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

by Alana White

  “What kind of secret?” Piero said.

  “She's our horse in the palio next year.”

  Next year? Guid'Antonio pursed his lips.

  “A mare?” Amerigo snickered.

  Lorenzo smiled. “I'll put her up against two of your studs anytime.”

  “What's her name?” Giovanni Vespucci said.

  “La Lucciola.” Firefly.

  “Why?”

  “Because when she races, she's quick as a lightning bug.”

  “Piero says you never lose the palio. Do you?” Giovanni Vespucci said.

  “What do you mean ‘next year’?” Guid'Antonio said.

  “I mean La Lucciola's not going to Florence till then, and I'm running a different horse in the palio finals next month. Giovanni, in answer to your question, no, I don't.”

  The three men were in a grassy meadow later that afternoon, armed with bows and arrows, when a rider crested the hill and galloped down the sloping hill toward them. He rode with his body bent forward and one hand clamped on his feathered cap to prevent it from blowing off his head.

  Amerigo shaded his eyes. “Who in Hades? Not your architect, surely.”

  Lorenzo dropped his bow and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Sangallo? No. A courier from Florence, I think.”

  The fellow slid from the saddle. “Il Magnifico! Buon giorno.” He bowed. “I've two messages. “First—” He caught his breath. “Maestro Giuliano da Sangallo sends word he's ill and won't be here this weekend. He regrets the inconvenience and will speak with you in town.”

  Lorenzo grunted his disappointment. “What else?”

  “Is Messer Guid'Antonio Vespucci here?”

  Guid'Antonio started. “I am.”

  The courier handed him a sealed note. Impressed in the red wax seal were the initials LTM. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici.

  Lorenzo raised his brow as Guid'Antonio broke the seal and scanned the words penned in Lucrezia's small, firm script. Grazie Madonna. Slowly, Guid'Antonio smiled.

  “Good news?” Lorenzo said.

  “Yes. What was lost has been found.” Guid'Antonio told them about the missing reservation book, not truly missing after all, but misplaced. Before revealing more, he glanced at Lorenzo, who sent the exhausted courier to the kitchen, where Falcone, having returned there with the boys after a visit with Belfiore, would put out bread and wine for the fellow's repast.

  “I asked your mother if Camilla Rossi da Vinci had a reservation at Bagno a Morba the week she disappeared. And, no, she did not. The lady's name does not appear anywhere in the reservation book.”

  Amerigo scratched his head. “Mona Lucrezia sent word all the way out here to tell you that?”

  “It is of the utmost importance,” Guid'Antonio said. And explained how the lack of a reservation implied Castruccio Senso knew his wife would never reach the baths.

  “Mon Dieu! That old toad had her killed?”

  “Perhaps,” Guid'Antonio said. “But he can come up with all kinds of stories.”

  By common consent, they moved to the shaded table. “Castruccio didn't think to make false arrangements?” Lorenzo said, eyes glowing. “There's stupidity personified. It could go far in proving he knew his wife never would arrive at Morba.”

  “You said yourself, Castruccio Senso's not a bright man,” Guid'Antonio said. “He can, and no doubt will, say he forgot to make arrangements before sending her on her way. Given his reputation as a fool, the court may believe him. And, yes, I do mean to have Palla arrest him straightaway.”

  “But why harm his wife? And use Turks as the culprits? There's a colorful touch,” Lorenzo said. “There remain the nurse and boy, as well. Surely, they didn't go along with Castruccio's villainy.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Guid'Antonio said. “As for why, Amerigo has suggested a new dowry as motive.”

  “Or there could be another woman involved,” Lorenzo said. “Think, though: that doesn't require killing your wife.”

  Guid'Antonio thought, Love? Please. Lust? And what, if anything, did any of this have to do with the painting of the Virgin Mary of Santa Maria Impruneta in Ognissanti?

  “Now what?” Amerigo said.

  “I want to question that little man as soon as possible,” Guid'Antonio said. “In the morning, we'll ride straight to Florence.” This meant returning home Saturday rather than Sunday, as they had originally planned to do. But something told him he must get to Castruccio Senso immediately.

  “In the meanwhile,” Lorenzo said, “I'll dispatch the courier with a note to Palla. He'll know what to do. Apply pressure with the rope, and Castruccio Senso will squeal like a pig.”

  Guid'Antonio pictured the corpulent little wine merchant stripped to the waist and hoisted toward the ceiling by his wrists. Till Castruccio confessed to something, Palla's men would give the cord a hard jerk, a strappado.

  “I want to interrogate him myself,” he said.

  “Both you and Palla, then. We'll all leave at first light tomorrow. A departure by you and Amerigo alone would leave the three boys and me traveling the road solo. I agree you must question Castruccio at once.”

  That evening, after looking in on Giovanni and bidding Amerigo good night, Guid'Antonio stepped out into the side yard off the kitchen and found Lorenzo sitting alone at the trestle table beneath a glittering canopy of stars, gazing toward the distant hills. Guid'Antonio sank onto the wooden bench beside him, feeling curiously calm.

  Lorenzo said, “I'd like to go six months to some place where Italian affairs were never mentioned. Even here in the country it's hard to forget about Girolamo Riario and the Pope. And so many other things.”

  Crickets chirped and fireflies lit the grounds, their starry pulse fading across the meadows. On the table a solitary candle burned with a pale yellow flame. Not scented beeswax, but plain cheap tallow.

  Lorenzo went on, “Do you honestly believe Castruccio Senso had Camilla killed? Whoever heard of such a thing? Not often, anyway.”

  “I believe it's far more complicated than that,” Guid'Antonio said. “I hope our young courier doesn't run afoul of thieves tonight.”

  “Given the florin I promised the lad to hurry, not even La Lucciola could catch up with him. Why wouldn't Camilla be suspicious when Castruccio Senso told her he was sending her to Morba? In my experience, Castruccio isn't a generous man.”

  Guid'Antonio tucked away Lorenzo's “experience” of a man who, only recently, he had professed not to know beyond a casual acquaintance. “What choice would she have but to go?”

  “True.”

  In the farmhouse there was muffled laughter: the two Giovannis. “They get along,” Lorenzo said, nudging Guid'Antonio, smiling. “Like you and me.”

  “They do,” Guid'Antonio said. And I will do anything to protect them.

  “In Florence, I'd like them to visit often. I think yours is good for mine.” Lorenzo mock-grimaced. “Maybe your Giovanni will rub off on my Piero.”

  “My Giovanni? Good? How?”

  Lorenzo laughed down in his throat. “Are you that surprised? He's quick. And generous to a fault. He gave, well, loaned, Piero his seashell tonight, so Piero could listen to it before falling asleep.”

  “It's Giovanni's prized possession,” Guid'Antonio said. “Such a little thing.” Not the painted wood puzzle he had brought Giovanni from Paris and not the marionette he had bought the boy in Piazza Santa Croce.

  “I'm glad he likes the shell,” Lorenzo said. “I brought it back from Naples.”

  Guid'Antonio sat rooted to the spot. Seashells and beeswax candles beset with cloves, with jasmine and lemon verbena. “You are generous to a fault, Il Magnifico.”

  Lorenzo's mouth quirked in a smile. “I enjoy sharing.”

  “As do I. Depending what it is.”

  In the gathering darkness, Guid'Antonio saw Lorenzo's smile widen. “Guid'Antonio, I brought back a trunk full of gifts, something for the families of my most trusted friends. Quite a small trunk, I might
add.”

  Guid'Antonio let it go at that. He was a Medici man. More than that, he was an Italian, as married to the soil and stones of Tuscany as he was to his wife and family. He said, “I'll speak with Capponi and Di Nasi and the others when we're back in Florence. See if I can persuade them to vote for making a call to the other councils for your balìa.”

  Lorenzo sat up straight, staring at him. “Mary and all the saints. I thought—”

  “I may have some influence, since I've been one of them,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “And will be again. But that's not what I meant. Why change your mind now?”

  “I want Florence in the best hands. Yours. And mine.”

  “We will make all the decisions, Guid'Antonio,” Lorenzo said earnestly.

  “I know.”

  “You know, too, I have no desire to be a lord. Everything I want is here: this farm, a peaceful night, time with my family and friends.”

  “In the end, that's all any of us want,” Guid'Antonio said.

  Now the words were spoken, there was no turning back, this he knew with absolute certainty. His destiny was tied to the Medici; it had been from the time of his birth and his baptism a few days later in the Baptistery in Piazza San Giovanni a few feet from the Cathedral doors in the Golden Lion district of Florence. The Baptistery that Florentines could not, or should not, now darken with their newborn babes because of the Pope's feud with Lorenzo.

  Whatever the circumstances, Florence, Lorenzo, and Guid'Antonio, the Medicis and the Vespuccis, were one and the same. Wasn't that what he had worked for his entire life? To defend one was to defend the other. He had fallen down once; he would not do so again.

  They sat in silence for what seemed to Guid'Antonio a long time, watching the fireflies, listening to the frogs croak in the yard. “It's late,” Lorenzo said at last, yawning. “Dawn will break early in the morning.”

  “I'll stay a moment longer.”

  Lorenzo turned to go.

  “One more thing,” Guid'Antonio said.

  Lorenzo swung back. For an instant in the pale light of the solitary candle, he appeared exhausted, his eyes glazed with fatigue. “Yes?”

  “If not La Lucciola, which horse will you run in the palio next month?” In late August, when Luca Landucci's brother, Gostanzo, would race astride his dragon through Florence's crowded streets, from the starting point in the meadow near Ognissanti Church to the finish line at San Piero Maggiore.

  “Since when did you take an interest in horse racing?” Lorenzo said, tilting his head slightly.

  “Since I was born a Florentine.”

  “Il Gentile,” Lorenzo said, grinning. “He's stabled at San Pietro in Grado, at our house west of Pisa. Under wraps till the day before the race. That Draghetto of Gostanzo's—” He kissed his fingertips. “There's a formidable horse. I don't mean to lose to him.”

  “I'm sure you don't.”

  Lorenzo's gaze swept the countryside, the fields, the River Ombrone. “One day I'll have fish ponds, mulberry trees and gardens as far as the eye can see. For now, I like the fact the place is rough and free, like my own nature.”

  “You are neither.”

  “Nor are you, my friend.”

  Guid'Antonio remained alone at the table for a long while, thinking and watching heat lightning play across the sky. Somewhere, a twig snapped. A stag or a doe, perhaps. A hare or a fox. Off in the woods, something screamed and died a slow death. He recognized the sound.

  A hare, after all.

  The following morning, Saturday, it was Lorenzo's son, Piero, who spotted the horseman first. Their small party had set off from Poggio shortly after dawn and had already traveled several hours. Now they could see the Palazzo della Signoria watchtower soaring toward the sky high above Florence's walls, Giotto's bell tower, and the Cathedral's softly rounded red brick dome. “We'll drop the boys off and go straight to the Bargello. That's where Palla will hold Castruccio till we get there,” Lorenzo was saying when Piero pointed to the rider pounding toward them from the Prato Gate.

  “Another courier?” Lorenzo said, his tone dubious.

  “No.” Amerigo straightened in the saddle. “What the devil? It's Cesare!”

  Guid'Antonio started to question this but in the next instant recognized the lithe figure of his manservant who had, they learned in the next moment, set out for Poggio to tell them that when Palla Palmieri's captain went to Castruccio Senso's house to take him in for questioning earlier this morning, he had found the wine merchant sprawled face down on the floor of his house with his head bashed in.

  THIRTY

  Camilla Rossi da Vinci's husband lay on his stomach in the sala of his house off Piazza Santa Maria del Carmine in the Santo Spirito quarter, his brains spilling onto the carpet in a lake of gore and blood. Guid'Antonio forced his thoughts from another, similar, setting and quickly surveyed his surroundings. Leaves of writing parchment ripped from Castruccio Senso's account ledgers littered the floor. A forziere, a strongbox bound with iron straps and fitted with locks, had been pitched against the tiered sideboard, then battered open, and the box emptied of its contents. Pottery lay everywhere in shards.

  Near Castruccio's corpse lay a pewter candlestick polished to resemble silver, the upper portion smeared with blood. Castruccio's right hand was outstretched, his fingers twisted in the strings of the rush hanging that had fallen from the portal separating the sala and the kitchen.

  In his mind's eye, Guid'Antonio saw the dead man scramble toward the back room, grasp the curtain, lowered at the time, and stumble under his pursuer's attack. He saw the candlestick slice Castruccio's head.

  Palla Palmieri, on his knees beside the body, rocked back on his heels, glancing up. “This is no robbery gone wrong. There was a battle here and demon anger to boot. You're here quickly.”

  “Yes, once I heard the news.”

  From the Prato Gate, Lorenzo and Cesare had escorted the three boys home, while Guid'Antonio and Amerigo nudged their horses into a trot across Ponte alla Carraia to the Santo Spirito quarter on Florence's left bank, Guid'Antonio cursing himself for a fool. The trip to Poggio had cost him dearly in more ways than one.

  “That fat little man did put up a fight,” Amerigo said. “I've never seen so much blood other than at hog killing season.”

  “Aptly put, Amerigo,” Palla said dryly.

  Guid'Antonio's gaze flicked to the black boy huddled by the towering sideboard, as distant from the corpse as he could get. Gently, Guid'Antonio approached. “Who's this?” he said, although, of course, he knew. This was Camilla Rossi's slave, about twelve years old, tall for his age, his whip-thin body struggling to catch up with his skinny legs and arms. He had been told the boy was not here, but in Vinci town, along with Camilla Rossi da Vinci's nurse, whoever the woman might be.

  The boy's cheeks and brow were bunched up in terror, and his dark skin had a chalky pallor. Amerigo removed a handful of sugared almonds from his scrip and offered them to the child. “What's your name?”

  The boy refused the sweets. “Luigi.” He shrank back into the corner, clenching his fist behind his back. “Don't hurt me, please!” he said, and burst into tears.

  Amerigo cast a silent plea to Guid'Antonio, who shrugged and nodded for him to proceed. “All right, then, Luigi,” Amerigo said. “I'll place the almonds in your scrip, and you can have them whenever you wish.” He bent down and slipped the sweets into the child's purse.

  “Signore, don't kill me!” the boy said, weeping. “I've done nothing wrong. I swear!”

  Guid'Antonio's heart dropped. “We're not going to hurt you. We're here to help you, child.” And to question you, he thought. Luigi, the little slave, had witnessed not one crime now, but two: Camilla Rossi's disappearance and the death of her husband, Castruccio Senso. How coincidental was that? And how lucky could Guid'Antonio get? He almost danced. “Would you like to go out into the sunshine? Yes?” He gave Palla a sideways look.

  Luigi's eyes flicked from one to
the other of them. Guid'Antonio pictured himself, Amerigo, and Palla through the boy's eyes: a trio of men gazing down at him, one taller than the other two, his black hair threaded with silver, all three dressed in plain brown clothes and boots, while the wiry, sharp-eyed police chief wore a wide leather belt with his dagger in full view. “Sì, Signore,” Luigi said meekly.

  “We passed some sort of test,” Amerigo commented quietly as they left the murder scene.

  “Now let's see if he does.” Every nerve in Guid'Antonio's body was aware of the boy's hand clenched behind his back.

  In the courtyard, a cardinal landed on the limb of a lemon tree and flew off again, searching for his mate. “Palla,” Guid'Antonio said beneath the sound of water gurgling in the fountain. “What happened?”

  “Just this: when your courier arrived from Poggio this morning, I sent a man straight here to arrest Castruccio. Instead, the fellow returned shaken, saying he had found Castruccio Senso murdered. I came at once.” Palla's eyes creased in the hint of a smile. “Guid'Antonio, are you questioning me?”

  “Take it how you will.”

  While Amerigo stood near the garden gate, blocking the house from the view of gawkers in the piazza, Palla settled with the boy, Luigi, on the stone bench encircling the fountain. Guid'Antonio, finding a stool with a rush seat, assumed a relaxed pose facing them.

  “Luigi,” Palla said, “I spoke with you a couple of weeks ago in Vinci. It concerned your mistress, Camilla Rossi. You remember, yes?”

  Fresh tears rolled down Luigi's cheeks. “You're the police.”

  “Guilty as charged. Luigi.” The boy would not look at him. “How came you here? I thought you were in Vinci.”

  “Ser Jacopo brought me here when he came to Florence,” Luigi said so softly, Guid'Antonio could just make out the words. “He—he had to go to a wine merchant in Orsanmichele, but he came here first.”

  Guid'Antonio glanced at Amerigo. That was last week, when they encountered the fiery Jacopo Rossi da Vinci in the crowded marketplace amongst peddlers and money changers. The same Jacopo who had eluded Amerigo when Amerigo gave chase.