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

by Alana White

  Overcrowded and blazingly hot, the market and stone loggia alongside the church of Saint Michael in the Garden, Orsanmichele, teemed with livestock and humanity.

  “Uncle,” Amerigo said, his tone subdued. He indicated the corpse hanging from a scaffold at one edge of the market, a man, judging from the remnants of his clothing, his eyes plucked out by scavenging crows.

  “Christ.” Guid'Antonio covered his mouth. Add rotting human flesh to the catalogue of foul odors. A hanging? Say what you would about crime and punishment in Florence, the death sentence was rare, except when applied to repeat criminals, immigrants, usually, men who came from the countryside into town to rob the poor of their meager income. Usually, too, hangings occurred at the gallows near the Gate of Justice, just outside Florence's eastern walls, not in one of the city's marketplaces.

  He swerved past two men crouched on their knees, casting dice in the dirt, despising the nearness of all this flesh pressed close together in one place, so he could barely breathe.

  “Wretched bastard!” Amerigo whipped around, cursing the old man who stepped down hard on his heel. A vagrant, judging from the sack of holes he carried over his back. “Get away from me! Next time, I'll throttle you!”

  “To hell with you, you Medici bootlicker!” the man shouted back. In an instant he vanished, swallowed up by the swarming crowd.

  “Amerigo, go easy.” Guid'Antonio saw fear and hatred in the eyes surrounding them. He jostled past the roughly clothed peddlers and farmers haggling with cooks who pinched their noses before peeking cautiously into ratty rush baskets. Ahead of him and Amerigo lay a sea of mangy horses, donkey carts, and wagons with sagging wheels. Behind them stood the wealthy shops of silk makers, furniture makers, and silversmiths, where no common wool carder or shearer had ever set foot.

  At the arched loggia buzzing with money changers, tables topped with the bright green cloths of the changers' trade clogged the columned arcade and spilled out into the piazza. Guid'Antonio and Amerigo pressed in beneath the vaulted roof, Amerigo fanning his face and puffing out his cheeks as they joined the line at the nearest table. “At least in here it's shady.”

  The fellow standing behind them chuckled. “Doubly so, if you include the thieves manning the tables.”

  Guid'Antonio turned slightly toward him. The fellow wore his hair brushed back from his long, narrow face, and he was freshly shaved, judging from the nicks and cuts along his jaws and chin. He was decently clothed and appeared to be in his middle thirties. Guid'Antonio acknowledged him with a slight nod, smiled down at the boy holding his hand, and left it at that.

  The line crawled. Guid'Antonio, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, glanced toward the church of Orsanmichele, his mind traveling inside the multistoried walls to Michelozzo's tabernacle covered in cherubs and encrusted with colored marble, lapis lazuli, gold, and stained glass. All this to house Bernardo Daddi's altar painting of the miraculous Virgin Mary who showed worshippers the path to salvation through personal intercession. Yes. Just ask them—they could offer proof.

  Florence was married to miracles, and yet Guid'Antonio meant to expose the latest one as a trick played on the people by mortal men to cast a shadow over Lorenzo de' Medici and his supporters. Within himself, Guid'Antonio groaned. He had bungled investigations before, but this time he must not lose. The stakes were too high. On his shoulders he carried the future of his family, his friends, and the Florentine Republic.

  Reining in his impatience—why was he always in the slow line?—he glanced at the gabled niches carved along Orsanmichele's near wall. In each niche (and there were more than a dozen around the church) there stood a marble statue of the patron saint of one of the city's major guilds, touchable, solid, and strong: Nanni di Banco's Saint Eligius for the smiths and farriers, Donatello's Saint Mark for the linen drapers and used-clothes dealers, Lorenzo Ghiberti's Saint John the Baptist for the cloth importers, along with his Saint Matthew for the bankers.

  Bankers. Guid'Antonio turned to the rates posted above the money tables. The grain prices listed on the boards were as disgraceful as the exchange rates. Beside him, Amerigo whispered, “These rates are pazzo, crazy! Peas, five lire a bushel and corn, fifty-nine soldi? How can people afford to eat?”

  “We keep hearing they cannot,” Guid'Antonio said, stepping up a pace.

  “It's because of the famine,” the man behind him said.

  “Excuse me?” Guid'Antonio turned back to him.

  “The high prices,” the man said. “The situation won't change as long as goods are being imported. Naturally, City Hall has been providing grain to those most severely affected by the war. Anything to keep the rabble satiated.”

  An ancient beggar, flesh and clothing draping off his bones, shifted silently past them, his shoulder brushing Amerigo's. “What, again?” Amerigo cried. The beggar held up his hands in self-defense. Shoulders hunched, he crossed himself and scuttled away.

  “I've had enough of this,” Amerigo said, starting after him.

  “Let it go,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “You'd best check your purse,” their companion said. “These vermin have nimble fingers.”

  “Not nimble enough to manufacture coins that aren't there,” Amerigo fussed, brushing imagined lice from his breast. “I don't like being tried.”

  “If not your coins, then your undergarments,” the man said.

  “Father—” The black-eyed boy gripping the man's hand gazed intently up at him. “Maybe the beggar was hungry.”

  “Maybe what?” the boy's father said, his tone so forceful many people in the loggia turned to stare. The child, his arm yanked sharply enough to lift him up off his feet, gasped. His thin face twisted in pain.

  “Haven't I warned you to keep quiet until you are addressed?”

  Guid'Antonio considered telling the fellow he might well apply the same standard to his own behavior. Instead: “Have I had the pleasure?” he asked.

  If the man had been wearing a cap, he would have doffed it. With a grand air, bowing with a flourish, he introduced himself as Ser Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. The boy, just about five years old, like Guid'Antonio's son, Giovanni, was Buonarroti's second oldest boy. The child's name? Michelangelo Buonarroti. And, yes, Ser Buonarroti knew Messer Guid'Antonio Vespucci, but only by appearance and reputation, much to his sorrow. The Buonarroti family lived in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, near Guid'Antonio's mother-in-law, Alessandra del Vigna. In Florence—in all Tuscany, surely!—everyone recognized the famous ambassador-jurist Guid'Antonio Vespucci and his faithful nephew, Amerigo.

  “Faithful nephew?” Amerigo growled deep in his throat. As for Ser Buonarroti, he was a Medici man by preference and a notary by profession, as well as the former governor of Caprese and Chiusi, two towns east of Florence.

  “And an insufferable bastard, too,” Guid'Antonio said sotto voce to Amerigo, who looked away, grinning.

  Buonarroti's attention had returned to his son. “ ‘Maybe the beggar was hungry,’ ” he mimicked in a high, child's voice. “As if that concerns men like us!” Buonarroti rolled his eyes. “My son was nursed in the country by common stock, Messer Vespucci, in the fat shape of a stonemason's wife, so I reap what I have sown. Still, what do you do when a babe's mother is frail and her milk dries up? For all that, the boy's sharp enough. At age seven, his brother Lionardo seems good for the Church. This one I'll see made into a successful money changer in the tradition of his great-grandfather. Or into a notary, like me.”

  Michelangelo's dark eyes stared up at his father, drinking him in. With each piercing word shooting from the man's mouth, the boy's expression turned ever more inward, although for a moment, Guid'Antonio thought he might pipe up again. Instead, the child set his shoulders resolutely and turned his gaze into the distance, as if he saw a larger battle looming, and he was fully armed.

  “Uncle Guid'Antonio.” Amerigo motioned with his head. “Do you know the bearded ruffian barreling toward us? His gaze is hard upon you.”


  Brown-skinned, with the sour smell of grapes about his loose clothing, the crab-like fellow pushed through the market, watching Guid'Antonio sideways. His black eyes glittered, the contempt in them a hateful, burning flame.

  “I've never seen him before.” Guid'Antonio held the man's stare until a jolt flashed between them with such hard force, Guid'Antonio's body stiffened, and he stumbled back.

  “Uncle Guid'Antonio?”

  “No, no. I'm all right.”

  Grinning wickedly, the other man glanced away, his stride sure and unbroken. At the purple-and-white canopied wine tent just beyond the loggia, he stopped and leaned menacingly toward the merchant sitting on a stool behind the hinged counter.

  A feeling of alarm stole over Guid'Antonio. What had just happened between him and that odd fellow? In those small black eyes, he had glimpsed a hateful challenge.

  “Not many thieves are stupid as yon cockroach hanged here last week,” Lodovico Buonarroti said.

  Guid'Antonio dragged his attention from the wine tent. “Do you know the hanged man's offence?”

  “He robbed a coin from one of the banking tables. The fool.”

  “And was hanged for it? Usually branding or whipping's the strongest penalty for a petty crime.”

  “Not these days. The Signoria has shown more muscle as of late, all to the good, I say. No man should be allowed to rob another and escape with a tap on the wrist.”

  Ser Buonarroti chuckled with satisfaction, and Guid'Antonio gave silent thanks he and Amerigo were next up in the line. But Buonarroti had not finished. Leaning around them, he taunted the cashier, “Just like you're about to rob us.”

  “If you don't like it,” the cashier said, thumbing over his shoulder toward the hard-muscled guards armed with axes posted around the loggia, “I suggest you take it up with them.”

  Buonarroti shrank back into his place. Guid'Antonio loosened the leather strings of his scrip. Whatever the exchange rate today, the traveler's vouchers in his purse had gone a long way in keeping him and his nephew safe from thieves as they rode home the past three weeks. Hmmm. Here was something else he wanted to know: had Camilla Rossi da Vinci been carrying coins or checks, and were any jewels missing from her goods?

  “Robber! Thief!”

  Guid'Antonio spun around. At the wine tent, the stranger who had bedeviled him shouted, “Bastardo! You know my grapes are worth twice that amount!”

  In the loggia, the buzz of conversation halted.

  “If you don't like our projected prices, Jacopo, come back in October during the harvest,” the wine merchant suggested civilly. “At the moment, there's nothing—”

  Jacopo spat a wad of phlegm that hit its mark straight in the vendor's ruddy face.

  The crowd gasped. One of the guardsmen took a step forward, grinning and fondling his axe. At the wine tent, Jacopo shouted, “Keep your blood money, you thieving Turk!” Turning quickly around, he shoved a path through the gathering. “I'll sell my grapes to Satan before I sell them to you!”

  “To Lorenzo, you mean!” someone yelled. “He won't pay you fairly, either!”

  So, the man's a winegrower, Guid'Antonio thought, watching the malcontent shove back through the crowd. He placed his signature on a check. “Ser Buonarroti,” he said as he counted the coins the banker pushed back across the table, “who was that hothead? You know, surely.”

  “Doesn't everyone? Oh!” Light dawned for Buonarroti. “You've been gone. That was Jacopo Rossi da Vinci, a naturally ill-tempered man, and then his daughter's been kidnapped and ravished by Turks, may the weeping Virgin take pity on her soul,” Buonarroti said.

  Guid'Antonio shouted, “Amerigo!”

  Amerigo shot from the loggia and pushed through the throng. “Here you, halt!”

  A farmer led his donkey cart directly into Amerigo's path. Casting a smirk back at Guid'Antonio, Jacopo Rossi da Vinci melted into the milling crowd. Amerigo gave chase for another few moments before returning to the table, crimson-faced. He bent down with his hands on his knees, gasping. “Lost him.”

  “By now he's halfway to the Prato Gate and on his way home to Vinci. Damn!” Guid'Antonio swore. According to Lorenzo, Palla Palmieri had questioned Camilla's father; but hearing firsthand the winegrower's version of events surrounding Camilla's disappearance appealed to him. To the list of people to be questioned add Jacopo Rossi da Vinci.

  He glanced down at little Michelangelo, who was standing quietly beside his father. Quietly, but God, those defiant eyes! Guid'Antonio held the child's dark liquid gaze and smiled. In return he received the whisper of a grin hinting at kinship and recognition.

  “Come, Amerigo.” Guid'Antonio strode from the loggia, thinking he would give a small fortune to know that child's mind. Deep in those shadowed eyes, he had seen his own son's measuring gaze, and he had felt a ray of hope.

  THIRTEEN

  “Que bella!” Amerigo kissed his fingertips. “Have you ever seen anything quite so lovely?”

  Guid'Antonio cast a glance around the close piazzetta pungent with the smell of dung and overripe fruit, expecting to glimpse the ankle of some pretty maiden. “Where?”

  Amerigo pointed to the bakery cart parked near a shady building. “Big fresh buns.” He clapped Guid'Antonio soundly on the arm. “Topped with sugar, maybe.”

  “Sugar?” Guid'Antonio peered at the cart, whose owner beckoned them with both hands, eyes squinting with shifty hope, daring any dogs, beggars, or ragged children to try and steal a crumb of the bread from his cart, sugared or otherwise.

  “Best pray, Amerigo. Surely such a precious commodity as sugar is in short supply.”

  “Do you want anything?” Amerigo said, already halfway across the piazza, light on his feet.

  Guid'Antonio drew a shivery breath. “Nothing that baker's selling.”

  Amerigo returned bearing what Guid'Antonio assumed was first prize on the baker's rack: a bun sprinkled with cinnamon and oozing pure golden honey. “Amazing,” Guid'Antonio said.

  Amerigo thanked heaven with an airy gesture. He had purchased two buns, in fact. “No sugar, but sweet and good.” They started walking again.

  “Cinnamon's expensive, Amerigo, coming as it does from the East. Surely there were less—” Guid'Antonio floundered, mentally calculating the number of pennies the buns must have stolen from Amerigo's scrip. “—less costly treats to be had.”

  Amerigo straightened alertly. “Marco Polo said the best cinnamon comes from Sumatra.”

  “And if Marco says it's so, it's so,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “Uncle, get back!” Amerigo jumped sideways, thrusting Guid'Antonio off the street. A rider on horseback pounded past in the opposite direction, so close, his mount's long tail brushed Guid'Antonio's cheek. A courier bearing news, his occupation made clear by his white armband and the white feather in his cap.

  “Fathead!” Amerigo yelled after the horseman, who ignored him, grinning over his shoulder in the direction of the pretty miss who had commanded his attention. Before riding into a wide byway, he blew the girl a kiss.

  “Stupido!” Amerigo said. “Uncle, are you all right?” A second courier galloped past, shouting for pedestrians to clear a path.

  Guid'Antonio brushed dust from his tunic. “I've survived worse.” Holiness! Was he under siege? He said, “I only wonder what's so important.”

  “I only wish the first fellow had fallen from the saddle.” Amerigo's gaze sought the object of the horseman's attention. “She is remarkably fetching.”

  About thirteen and still unmarried, for she was uncloaked, the girl wore a gown whose white fabric was so sheer, it appeared spun from butterfly wings. Budding breasts pushed against a row of narrow lace. Pale fingers clutched a prayer book encrusted with glittering gemstones. The girl's maid glowered at Amerigo and hurried her charge along a side street toward Via Porta Rossa.

  “Very pretty,” Guid'Antonio agreed. “Now, come along.”

  “I'll wager she's attending Mass at Trini
ta,” Amerigo said, sucking honey from his thumb and fingers.

  “Yet another service unattended by you,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “Today's one thing, tomorrow's another. If I sweet-talk the girl's maid, the possibilities are limitless.”

  Guid'Antonio gave him a sharp look. “She's from a good house, Nephew. Her relatives won't have her tampered with. Try secret meetings, and you'll wind up with your cock in a sling.” It was no secret to him how candlelit chapels and dark, deserted church naves provided couples with hidden meeting places. God knew Florence was a hive of churches. No telling how many hot professions of love their sacred walls had heard, breathy sighs rising up amongst the brushstrokes of Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Giotto, Masaccio, Verrocchio, Sandro and, oh, so many others, or what those walls had seen.

  He had a momentary picture of painted saints staring down on panting, half-clothed youths and maidens, naked boys, frustrated priests. He felt himself harden and paused his step on this feverishly hot July day, clearing his throat, one independent part of him wondering if he was completely mad. No, just horny, like some fourteen-year-old. He cut a look at his nephew. Like Amerigo and every other man still breathing.

  The jingling of the doorbell announced their presence in Luca Landucci's apothecary shop at Canto de' Tornaquinci, the tight corner where Via della Spada and Via della Vigna Nuova came together near Palazzo Rucellai. Within the Sign of the Stars, baskets of dried herbs lined one wall and hung from the wooden rafters. Shelves displayed lead-glazed earthenware jars, sapphire blue, golden yellow, and sea green, each labeled in the druggist's neat hand. The shop was small and close with only one window, but the space was fairly lit by the glow of a pair of oil lamps, one at each end of the counter, and by candles burning here and there.