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

by Alana White

  “Giorno,” Lorenzo said, smiling at the child, who ducked his head and looked quickly back up, frowning. And then an answering smile crept around his lips. “Giorno,” he said, and winced, feeling his mother's pinch.

  Slowly, the men twisted right and walked straight northeast with the massive bulk of the Cathedral and Brunelleschi's red brick dome looming up behind them. Guid'Antonio kept his eyes dead ahead. Here the ground was so rough, he thought Alessandra del Vigna might bounce off the cart. Beside him, the mastiff kept a steady pace.

  At the close of the passage, Cesare paused, content for the moment to remain in the safety of the shadows.

  Straight across Piazza della Annunziata sat Santissima Annunziata, its facade stark and unyielding in the light of the sun's white glare. Both lawn and church appeared deserted. There was no sign of Palla or his guards now. Guid'Antonio felt Amerigo's apprehensive glance. With the sound of his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, he waited for Cesare to raise his shield and lead them into the open for the last leg of their journey. The horses snuffled and neighed, and Cesare squared his shoulders. Beside Guid'Antonio, the mastiff waited. Reaching down, he brushed his hand over the dog's furry big head for the second time that day.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The wagon advanced into the light.

  Guid'Antonio's eyes traveled toward his right side, where the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Hospital of the Innocents, lay in bands of shadow. The hospital, designed by Brunelleschi as Europe's first orphanage, showed no signs of life. A glance to the opposite side of the piazza revealed a clutter of houses and shops shoved one up against the other. From open windows and doors, murderous eyes stared back at the funeral party as it began its slow progress across the grassy square.

  “We're being watched again,” Antonio Vespucci said.

  Amerigo gave a hollow laugh. “Does this surprise you?”

  The inhabitants of this district were not gifted master tailors whose perfumed hands worked with damasks and brocaded velvet cloth, small silvered ornaments, and silken gold thread which bore Florence great fame, but poor wool carders, combers, sorters and the like, men and women whose place in the city's cloth industry was firmly fixed on the bottom rung.

  Guid'Antonio concentrated on the death wagon and the path its wheels pressed in the grass. Within the walls of the orphanage, a baby cried, shrilly, relentlessly. Antonio Vespucci said, “That child sounds as if its heart has suffered a terrible wound and is about to break.”

  “I suppose it has and is,” Guid'Antonio said as they passed the basin where people deposited babies without fear of being seen. One too many mouths to feed? Not enough medicine to go around? A female rather than a coveted male heir? Better the Ospedale and life as an orphan than suffocation at its father's hands.

  At the doors of Annunziata, Cesare halted, holding the Vespucci shield stiffly erect. Long moments passed, while sweat dripped down Guid'Antonio's neck and back. “Where are the friars?” Amerigo said. “We look like fools standing here.”

  “Surely the Servants of Mary won't betray us now,” Antonio Capponi said, his voice tight with fear.

  “Do they,” Lorenzo said, “and I'll remind them my father commissioned Michelozzo to restore this place. And to design the marble tabernacle for their own painting of a miraculous Virgin.”

  Ignoring the others, Guid'Antonio stepped alongside the wagon for a clear view of the church front. It was then Annunziata's doors swung open and two of the black-robed Servants of Mary stepped out onto the lawn. From beneath his wrinkled brow, Brother Bardi, one of two infirmarians who had tended Mona Alessandra's corpse, glared at him. “God has watched you with a careful eye today.”

  “Praise Him,” Guid'Antonio said.

  Brother Bardi gestured toward his companion, a thin, pale fellow who blew out his cadaverous cheeks and in a high, reedy voice began the funeral Mass. “With God's grace and mercy, Mona Alessandra del Vigna has departed this blasphemous world.”

  “ ‘Blasphemous,’ ” Amerigo said, bristling with indignation. “He means us.”

  “Bow your head,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “Why do you think they wear long cassocks?” Lorenzo whispered behind them. “So they can kick you before you see their leg move.”

  “Wish to God he would get this over with,” Pierfilippo Pandolfini hissed. “We're ready targets out here in the piazza.”

  “As always, Pierfilippo, thank you for stating the obvious,” Antonio Capponi said.

  “. . . Amen.” The friars spun and vanished inside the church in a flurry of black robes.

  Amerigo nodded toward the horses and wagon. “A gold florin says when we return the animals are gone.”

  Guid'Antonio looked around. “You.” He gestured toward the funeral cart: “Go, sit. Stay.” Regarding him happily, the mastiff crossed the grass on huge paws and planted himself beside the funeral cart.

  “Well,” Guid'Antonio said. “Good dog.”

  Resuming his measured pace, Cesare led them thorough the church portal and into the Chiostrino dei Voti, where bodies dangled from the rafters, tied to the beams with brown ropes. “God's wounds! They surprise me every time,” Amerigo said, staring up at the wood and wax effigies of men who had commissioned their likenesses from craftsmen like Andrea del Verrocchio, and then had them strung up in the cloister as a sign of their piety.

  “And me,” Guid'Antonio said.

  Heavy, dark-colored cloths draped the sanctuary windows. Slowly, Guid'Antonio's eyes adjusted to the somber atmosphere circling them all around. Within the darkness of Annunziata, all seemed well. Still, the church seemed eerily quiet for a space enclosing twenty anxious men.

  They followed Cesare past vacant chapels, toward the black hooded figures present on the high altar. “The place seems safe enough,” Lorenzo said.

  “We're blind as ship mice in here,” Antonio Capponi hissed. “Yet not one of us thought of it.”

  “I did,” Palla Palmieri said, his slight form stepping from the gloom.

  “Christ!” Pierfilippo Pandolfini said, his voice uncertain.

  “Mary!” Bartolomeo Scala said, clutching his chest.

  Guid'Antonio's fingers touched the dagger hidden in his cloak.

  A smile appeared on Lorenzo's lips. “Now we are completely safe, my friends.”

  Palla gestured lightly toward his sergeants, dark-clad shades interspersed at intervals along the chapel walls, their forms part and parcel with the bulky dark. “Let us hope,” he said, and melted back into the folds of the church.

  “Did you invite him here?” Guid'Antonio said.

  Lorenzo shook his head. “Just doing his job, I think.”

  At the altar, the Servants of Mary gazed on the mourners with indifferent expressions. At a sign from one of them, a trio of friars set the Vespucci family's beeswax offering alight. The flames sputtered and flared, and the men on the wall at Guid'Antonio's side jumped to the floor. “Christ!” he shouted, jerking back.

  Antonio Capponi chuckled darkly. “No, it's only Andrea del Castagno.”

  With wildly pounding heart Guid'Antonio watched the men of the religious confraternity set the litter bearing Alessandra del Vigna's corpse on the church floor. He had forgotten the expressive frescoes “Andrea without mistakes” had painted on Santissima Annunziata's sanctuary walls. Saint Julian, Saint Jerome. He glanced around, heat climbing up his throat and into his face. None of the other men had been affected so by the wall painting.

  He knelt at the altar and at the far end of the rail saw Giuliano de' Medici on his knees, praying. A wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him.

  Beside him, Lorenzo whispered, “I didn't think to tell you. That wood and wax image of my brother was crafted while you were gone.”

  Guid'Antonio rose with the others, shaking. “And it's his exact likeness, too.”

  The figure's wooden framework had been covered with waxed cloth arranged in lifelike folds, the head and hands copied from life and painted in oil. A swat
h of lustrous human hair the color of Giuliano de' Medici's rich black locks brushed the figure's painted cheeks. The face was Giuliano's impossibly beautiful countenance.

  Please, don't look over at me, Guid'Antonio thought, and it occurred to him he was mad. On the morning he and Amerigo first returned to Florence, hadn't he seen Giuliano sink to his knees in the mud, blood gushing from his broken head? Later that same day, hadn't the Virgin Mary of Santa Maria Impruneta whispered his name? Now, he saw century-old saints leaping from Annunziata's walls and imagined the wax figure kneeling at the altar was Giuliano de' Medici in the flesh.

  If only that were so. If only Giuliano could finish his communication with God, stand, and join Alessandra del Vigna's mourners as they stepped back into the piazza's molten glow. But for all the perfect likeness, the clothing and human hair, even Andrea del Verrocchio could not work that particular miracle.

  In sandals fashioned from the finest calf leather, the friars accompanied them toward the Chiostrino dei Morti, the Cloister of the Dead, where Maria's mother would be laid to rest. “There I am, too,” Lorenzo said, shifting his gaze back toward the tall wax figure standing near that of his brother kneeling at the altar rail, but deeper in the shadows, dressed in the long red gown of the Florentine citizen. “In case you hadn't noticed.”

  “Oh, I had. Verrocchio again?”

  “With his help, yes.”

  “Two Lorenzos, one in wax and one in the flesh,” Guid'Antonio said, still rattled and uneasy.

  “Actually, there are several more,” Lorenzo told him, grinning. “Another one here in Florence in the church of the nuns of Chiarito in front of the miraculous crucifix, and one in Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi before the precious Madonna.” A spark of self-mockery animated Lorenzo's voice.

  In the Cloister of the Dead, the marble slab with access to the underground vault had been pushed aside in readiness for their coming. Rough-hewn steps plunged down into the crypt. Foul odors wafted up. Guid'Antonio covered his mouth with his hand. It struck him then how kind—not to mention brave—the twelve men of the religious confraternity were to accompany them here today. One fellow backed awkwardly down the steep short steps, holding a sputtering torch aloft, awkward in his bulky white robe, but managing it nonetheless. Two others, having secured Alessandra's corpse to the litter with straps, manhandled the unwieldy business down into the dark, and then helped their brother place the lady on her stone bed.

  Grunts and soft oaths floated up the steps. In a whisper, Guid'Antonio called Cesare's name. The time had come for them to depart, while the confraternity remained to heft the marble slab back into place.

  Back outside again, where white light seared the piazza, Guid'Antonio peered toward the funeral wagon. The four horses whickered and lifted their heads, and the mastiff fetched up a lopsided grin, jowls dripping. On the ground beside him, someone had placed a pottery bowl chipped around the rim and filled it with water for him to drink.

  Amerigo, glancing around Maria's crowded sala, said, “When have people felt so happy to have survived a funeral procession?”

  “Never in my memory.” A feeling of profound ecstasy fluttered in Guid'Antonio's throat. In the courtyard, Cesare had collected sweat-stained cloaks from the men. Now, standing with Amerigo, looking around the modest chamber, Guid'Antonio saw Alessandra Scala approach her father, Bartolomeo, her face illuminated with joy. Alessandra's mother, Maddalena Scala, still lay abed, waiting for the birth of the Scala family's next baby girl.

  In a swirling haze, Guid'Antonio saw Lorenzo's two sisters, Nannina Rucellai and Bianca de' Pazzi, but not Lorenzo's wife, the disapproving Clarice Orsini from Rome, who surely believed that if God had not struck them down today, it was because He had not got around to it yet. He saw tables draped with white linen cloths. On the tables were small alabaster vases tied with yellow silk ribbons and filled with poppies the dark red color of blood. He saw Maria speak with Antonio Capponi on her way to the kitchen, and heard Elisabetta Vespucci caw, “Domenica! Quick, the roasts! Olimpia! Not that one, you brainless twit!”

  Maria had rushed to him the instant he entered the house and wrapped her arms, sheathed in black silk, around him. “Bless Mary, you're safe, Guid'Antonio.”

  And he had answered softly: “I'm here, and I'm whole.”

  Amerigo touched his arm now. “You're not listening.”

  “Not completely, no.”

  “I was asking what we will name our dog.”

  “Our dog? No. Give an animal a name and it owns you.”

  Amerigo straightened his shoulders. “He stood by us today. Along with everyone else.”

  Not everyone, Guid'Antonio thought. Many in the Medici inner circle had not shown their faces, among them Tommaso Soderini. His gaze went to the trestle tables, where Olimpia was tending the poppies. Cesare flashed by and her hand shot out. Scarlet petals and water bled across the linen tablecloth. Guid'Antonio blinked.

  “Olimpia!” Amerigo's mother shrilled, poking her head out from the kitchen. “Get in here!”

  “Alexander the Great named a city in India after his dog,” Amerigo said stubbornly.

  Across the room, Cesare whisked up the flowers, uttered reassurances to Olimpia, and retrieved fresh cloths from God only knew where. “Alexander the Great conquered the world. I doubt either you or I ever will,” Guid'Antonio said. What had he just witnessed? Olimpia and Cesare? Really?

  “Never say ‘never,’ Uncle Guid'Antonio. And by the way—” Amerigo narrowed his eyes spitefully. “Didn't you mean to speak with Lucrezia Tornabuoni regarding Camilla Rossi da Vinci? Lucrezia is here today.” Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici: Lorenzo and Giuliano's mother.

  Guid'Antonio's body flashed hot with dread. Lucrezia's figure was so petite, he had missed her in the milling crowd. She and another woman were standing by the credenza, staring directly at him.

  “Smell that food?” Amerigo said, inhaling deeply. “Roast chicken stuffed with artichoke hearts. Alessandra Scala and her flock of sisters brought it. Everyone brought something, food, wine. I can hardly wait.”

  “Then don't,” Guid'Antonio said, glancing away from Lucrezia de' Medici, feeling panicked, a sensation that was to him quite new.

  Cesare floated back into the sala trailed by a phalanx of trim young men carrying steaming food on silver trays aloft in their hands. On his tunic just above his breast, Cesare wore a scarlet poppy tied with a ribbon of narrow yellow silk.

  Guid'Antonio smiled slightly before bracing himself and turning back toward the credenza, and then all around, surveying the crowd. Lucrezia de' Medici had vanished, leaving no sign she had ever been in the house.

  All right then: next stop, the Medici Palace.

  A servant escorted Guid'Antonio up the stone staircase and down the hall to the Medici Chapel. Was it his imagination, or did a shadow pass over Lucrezia's face when he appeared at the chapel door? If so, she banished it at once. “Guid'Antonio, welcome to our house,” she said in the melodious voice he recalled from memory. “Join me here.”

  He lowered himself into the pew facing the altar, feeling light-headed now he was here, wrapped in the glory of Benozzo Gozzoli's luminous Adoration of the Magi encircling the chapel walls. “Grazie, Mona Lucrezia.”

  She surprised him by reaching over and placing her slim fingers lightly on his arm, just as she might have done before. “It's good to have you home, Guid'Antonio mio.”

  My Guid'Antonio. He tucked that away. “Thank you, my lady.” Anything more would have been much too complicated.

  “A friend and I had given our word we would deliver food to some of the particularly needy this afternoon. We couldn't disappoint them. Has the banquet ended?”

  “Not yet. People are still visiting with Maria. Your Lorenzo included.”

  Lucrezia gave him a curious look from hooded brown eyes, and silence filled the chapel. Her white cowl framed a strong nose, pleasing lips, and an even chin. Although petite, she radiated strength. He thought silver must s
treak her dark hair, now she was in her mid-fifties. “Are you still writing poetry?” he said.

  “Am I still breathing? Yes.”

  Blockhead! Why had he thought she might quit writing? Like Lorenzo, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici was a widely known poet of considerable talent. A writer of religious poems, only, very unlike her son.

  “Although,” she said, “I'm busy these days with so many other things. Grandchildren. The household. Letters from everywhere. Prioresses needing assistance, priests, even the queen of Bosnia. Mostly, they ask what I can do for them.” She smiled. “Like they do Lorenzo.”

  “Bosnia?” he said.

  She nodded. “The queen asked me to find bankers who will pay her in cash and not cloth in these troubled times.” A small smile crept across Lucrezia's thin lips. “Everyone thinks I have some sway over my son.”

  Guid'Antonio relaxed a little. “Everyone knows you do.”

  This she acknowledged with a modest tilt of her head. After her husband Piero's death just a little over ten years ago, despite her quiet nature, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici had stood as a visible presence alongside her two sons and her daughters, Bianca and Nannina, as well as her husband's illegitimate daughter, Maria, as matriarch of the Medici family. It was no secret young Lorenzo had leaned on his mother for support and advice. He still did. People sought her help with him for pardons, charity, and letters of recommendation. This, along with her own accomplishments as writer, businesswoman, and patron of the arts had made her arguably the most powerful woman in Florence. Observing her now, Guid'Antonio tried not to think of his kinsman, Piero Vespucci, and the pleading letters Piero had written Lucrezia and Lorenzo from the Stinche.

  She touched the plain gold cross on a chain at her neck. “Unfortunately, here at the close of an already difficult day, I have crushing news for him. Tommaso sent a note from the Signoria a short while ago.”