The Miracles of Prato

by Laurie Albanese

  Fra Filippo knelt and pressed his face against her belly. He had no child on earth, only one poor soul born too soon to the woman he’d known in Padua. Long ago he’d come to accept that while even cardinals had illicit children, he would have none.

  “I’ve always longed for a son,” he said. “I can’t feel sorrow at such news.”

  “But we’re not married in the eyes of Rome. When they see me in the streets they will speak ill of me, and just think what they’ll say at Santa Margherita! Filippo, now more than ever we have to pray that favorable word comes from Rome.”

  “I don’t care what they say in Rome,” he said passionately. He stood and took Lucrezia’s face in his hands. “Since the moment I saw you, Lucrezia, I’ve seen and felt many things I’d never believed I would see on this earth. We’ll pray and work fervently for word from Rome. But no matter what, I’ll never let you live in shame.”

  Bolstered by his words, she let his joy wash over her.

  “And if Rome says it is impossible?” she asked, putting her cheek on his chest.

  Fra Filippo knew that what happened in Rome would depend on the goodwill and influence of the Medici. God governed heaven, Satan ruled over hell, but it was Cosimo de’ Medici who willed what happened on their peninsula.

  “Remember, nothing is impossible if God wills it,” the painter said. “If God wills it, nothing is impossible.”

  Despite the monk’s happiness, he heard the echoes of Ser Cantansanti, his face stern as he warned Fra Filippo not to flaunt his romantic dalliance under the watchful eye of the Medici.

  You are following God’s will, Lucrezia,” Spinetta said one morning. “But I, too, must do what God asks of me. I must return to the convent to celebrate the Lord’s birth.”

  “You’ve been very good to me,” Lucrezia said bravely. “I know Fra Filippo will care for me. Please tell the others I am sorry if I have caused them pain.”

  On the eve of the Nativity, Lucrezia said a tearful good-bye to Spinetta and watched through the window as her sister followed the wiry figure of Paolo through the streets, heading toward the gates of Santa Margherita. When the two disappeared from view, Lucrezia put on the simple dress she’d stitched from the remnants Fra Filippo had brought to her, and stood outside until she was able to catch the eye of a woolgatherer’s wife.

  “I would like to take in the air today,” Lucrezia said, with a sad smile. “And would be ever grateful if you would accompany me.”

  The woman, called Anna, was one of many in the city who’d heard rumors of the miracle at the palazzo de’ Valenti, and believed in Lucrezia’s goodness. She was simple but devout, and walked beside Lucrezia to and from the banks of the Bisenzio River, speaking little. Lucrezia hid her face with her hood, but when she returned home her cheeks were pink, and she felt the strength of a new resolve.

  “I don’t want to hide,” she said to Fra Filippo. “It’s the eve of Our Lord’s birth. I want to go to church and receive the sacrament.”

  Fra Filippo sent a note to his friend Fra Piero, who hadn’t visited the bottega since the day the two had exchanged their vows. Their friend arrived at the house at sunset, carrying a ham in a sack. Birdlike and full of energy, his nose red from the cold, the procurator tossed his gift onto the table, crossed the room, and opened his arms to embrace Lucrezia.

  “You’re radiant,” he said, his warm smile displaying his crooked teeth.

  Grasping her hand, he drew Lucrezia into the kitchen, where he sat her close to the fire, took a seat on a stool, and guessed at her news.

  “A child is a blessing,” he said kindly. Although he wondered about the source of the child’s seed, he remained silent on this question, and reminded himself that the vows he’d pronounced for his friends had the Lord’s legitimacy, if not the pope’s approval. “How wonderful that you’ve received this gift during this joyous season.”

  After he’d said a prayer for mother and baby, the three of them ate heartily, put on their warmest cloaks, and set off for Mass at Sant’Ippolito.

  Stepping through the great arched doorway of green marble, Lucrezia felt swept up by the glorious joy of worship. She’d been hiding in the bottega too long. It was good to be back in church. She walked between Fra Filippo and Fra Piero, and sat with the other parishioners. She listened to the voices chanting in prayer, and she sang along in her heart. When she walked up to the altar behind Fra Filippo, and took the holy body of Jesus Christ into her mouth, she felt nearly faint with satisfaction and piety.

  She was walking back to her place in the nave when someone whispered, “la donna,” as she passed. She looked up to see the curious eyes of a fine lady upon her.

  “It’s her,” the woman said to her companion as she held her hand out toward Lucrezia. The woman wore a dress of double silk, a berretto, and a velvet mantello. Her fingers shimmered with rings and emitted a gentle perfume.

  “Do you know me?” Lucrezia asked, flustered. She peered into the woman’s face, sure that she would see hatred and anger.

  “I know that yours is the face of de’ Valenti’s Madonna,” the woman whispered, making the sign of the cross. “The Miraculous Madonna. They say that you’re blessed.”

  Walking home after Mass, Lucrezia slipped her arm through the monk’s and pulled herself toward him. The sky was black, and she could read the constellations.

  “There it is,” she said, pointing overhead. “The star the three kings followed.”

  Fra Filippo put his cheek next to hers and followed the direction of her finger until he, too, saw the bright star. There was the promise of snow in the air.

  “I’m happy,” she said.

  Fra Filippo beamed down at her.

  “The world is so beautiful tonight,” she said quietly. “I know we have many worries but still, Filippo, I am very happy.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tuesday of the Sixth Week After Epiphany, the Year of Our Lord 1457

  “I wouldn’t have believed it if my Luigi hadn’t delivered a piece of leather to Fra Filippo’s bottega and seen her with his own eyes,” the cobbler said to the men gathered in his bottega on the Piazza Mercatale. “Now I’ll have to beat it into my boy that nuns aren’t for the taking.”

  The others laughed, their mouths full of black teeth and brown bread.

  For months, Lucrezia had kept her condition concealed under a cloak, but by late February the child in her womb was visible to anyone who stopped to look. She’d seen the way the boy stared at her that morning when he delivered the piece of leather she needed to fashion a harness for her partum belt. She knew that soon word would be all over Prato.

  “The white monk must be busy at work painting his own desco da parto,” the baker joked, slapping his hands against his apron and sending a cloud of flour into the air. “He can do the baptism, too, and he won’t have to pay that greedy Inghirami!”

  The cobbler spat on the ground. He held a shoe between his knees and hammered off a broken heel.

  “His bastard and his whore will need all the blessings they can get,” the man said, shaking the hair out of his eyes.

  Warming themselves by the cobbler’s fire, the tradesmen and artisans whose bottegas lined the city square stood together eating from their pockets and enjoying the pleasure of a bawdy tale. The fishmongers, who’d seen Fra Filippo hurrying to snatch up the unsold fish they were required by decree to dump into the street at the end of each day, chuckled in disbelief at news of Lucrezia’s pregnancy. The leatherworkers hiked at their tooled belts and wondered why men of the Church could take mistresses when they had to make do with the scrawny whores who lived behind the market plaza.

  “As bad as they are in Rome, at least they don’t make a public display of their sins,” said Franco, whose younger brother was the stable boy at the palazzo de’ Valenti.

  “That’s right,” the others agreed, nodding their heads. “It will cost him plenty to buy the indulgences for this in Rome.”

  News of Lucrezia’s preg
nancy circulated from the Piazza Mercatale to the Piazza San Marco, and from there to the Piazza San Francesco. By Vespers, the entire Valenti household had been told. Two kitchen maids laughed spitefully, but the others wept when they heard that the model for their Miraculous Madonna was soiled. Signora Teresa de’ Valenti, who’d remained convinced of Lucrezia’s goodness and chastity even after she’d heard the girl was living with the monk, was horrified.

  “It’s nothing to smile at, Nicola!” the signora scolded the maid.

  Until the information was whispered to her as she sat by the fire, Signora Teresa had somehow believed the girl was still pure in spite of the place where she laid her head at night. Even now, the donna felt certain that Lucrezia had been led astray by Satan, seduced or perhaps taken against her will, as happened to so many young women.

  “It’s tragic,” she said later to her sister-in-law, who had been present at Ascanio’s birth and been the first to call Teresa’s survival a miracle. “One so fair is at the mercy of the world after she’s lost her father’s protection.”

  The merchant’s wife pushed herself onto her feet and walked purposefully to stand before the painting that all in her household now called the Miraculous Madonna. For a moment she allowed herself to wonder if perhaps the girl’s virtue was still intact; maybe Lucrezia was innocent, even as the Holy Mother had conceived without surrendering her virginity.

  “Blasphemy!” she said aloud, shaking the thought from her mind. But Teresa de’ Valenti couldn’t wholly dismiss her impossible notions. The young woman had saved her life. Sister Lucrezia’s face had become the one that Teresa prayed to, the one she saw in her mind when she said her Ave Maria. Surely there was something she could do to help Lucrezia now.

  “I’ll send a note to Sister Pureza,” Teresa said. As the wife of the city’s wealthiest merchant, she knew that her word swayed opinion on the streets. Perhaps, considering how generous her husband had been to Santa Margherita this year, she could wield her wishes inside the convent walls, as well. “I’ll remind her how the girl assisted me and ask her to be kind and merciful.”

  Turning to Nicola, who was putting a stack of clean linens away in the birthing chest, the merchant’s wife called for vellum and a pot of ink.

  By the dim sunlight that bled through the high window of her cell, Sister Pureza read the letter that had arrived at the convent along with a small pouch of lire. The coins had been snatched up by Mother Bartolommea but the note had been given to Sister Pureza with the seal unbroken.

  If it is true, I beg you to have mercy, Sister Pureza read. She, too, is a child of God, and in need. I implore you to bear in mind, Sister, she is only a helpless woman in a world of strong men.

  The old nun didn’t want to believe the rumors that had reached the convent, but it seemed impossible to deny them any longer. She dropped the parchment onto her writing table and paced her small cell.

  She’d done all that she could think of, and still the girl had fallen to sin. She’d come to think of Sister Lucrezia as her own charge, almost like a daughter to whom she would pass on her knowledge of herbs and midwifery. Of course the world was full of strong men; this is why she’d begged Lucrezia to return to the convent. But the girl had refused. Sister Pureza was heartsick, and she was angry.

  She remembered how small and frail the novitiate had looked in Fra Filippo’s kitchen, yet how stubbornly she’d refused to return to Santa Margherita. Even when Spinetta had come back, Lucrezia had remained with the monk, alone. She’d stayed of her own volition and now, instead of using her healing hands and soothing words to help others, Lucrezia would cry out in the agony of Eve’s labor. Her bastard child would come into the world covered in blood, and wrapped in shame. And the Lord, who didn’t look kindly upon children born of lust, might well inflict the same loss upon Lucrezia that He’d inflicted upon Pasqualina di Fiesola so many years ago.

  In his wood-paneled studio in the southern wing of Santo Spirito in Florence, Prior General Ludovico Pietro di Saviano tossed the offensive letter into the fire and watched it blaze.

  Once again, Provost Inghirami had been the bearer of bad news. I am sorry to disturb you with news of such a sordid nature, but it is my duty. Indeed, the provost carried out his duties well when they involved delivering embarrassing news to the prior general. What a good laugh they must be having in Prato, Saviano thought sourly: the half-mad monk walking arm in arm with the pregnant novitiate, thumbing their noses at the Carmelites, the Augustinians, and the Lord Himself. It was small consolation, but at least everyone would now know what a wicked seductress hid behind that angelic face.

  “Damn her and damn the monk.” Saviano’s words ripped from his mouth, although there was no one there to hear them. “And a curse on their bastard, too.”

  The prior general froze. A bastard. The child was most certainly a bastard, but was it Lippi’s bastard? He did a quick calculation of time, remembering Lucrezia’s thin wrists twisting beneath his hands, the gurgle of pain from her throat as he entered her. He couldn’t deny the possibility. He felt a moment of manly pride at his virility, followed quickly by the horror of what might be.

  But the prior general wouldn’t allow himself a moment of pity. The woman had chosen her lot. She’d proven herself a harlot by living in sin.

  He stood taller in his costly vestments from Rome. It was bad enough the novitiate had shamed him and shamed the convent, but parading through Prato with a huge belly for all to see was too much. The monk had the protective shield of Cosimo, but this puttana was still an Augustinian charge. And he was still in control of her.

  As the smell of singed paper filled his nostrils, Prior General Saviano contemplated his next move. Only he knew what was best for the Order. He would do what he had to do for himself, for Santa Margherita, and for the sanctity of the Augustinians.

  Rumors continued and the foot traffic along Via Santa Margherita swelled as the curious and the outraged tried to peer inside the monk’s bottega for a glimpse of the pregnant Madonna. Afraid and ashamed, Lucrezia hung the largest piece of cloth they had across the window that faced the street. The cloth was red, and bathed the inside of the bottega in a pink light that would have pleased Lucrezia if it hadn’t been there to hide her from the world.

  Occasionally one of the woolgatherers’ wives knocked shyly on her door to see how she fared, and Nicola came from the Valenti palazzo each week with a basket of fruit or some sweet rolls from Signora Teresa. But for the most part Lucrezia was alone while Fra Filippo worked on the frescoes at Santo Stefano, and she sat in the pink light pretending she didn’t hear the people on the road outside.

  “Maybe it’s an admission of sin,” said one woolfuller to the other, as they passed in the morning and saw the red curtain in the window. But when they returned that afternoon, Fra Filippo was taking the curtain down so he could paint inside by the natural light, and the passersby began to speculate that the red curtain, appearing and disappearing in the window with no apparent logic, was meant to send them some message or sign.

  “Maybe it’s red to tell us the child is purged from the womb,” said one of the old merchants’ wives who believed Satan had taken up residence along Via Santa Margherita.

  “Maybe it’s there to keep the Evil One away,” said another.

  “Or to welcome Satan,” said an old crone, whose body was twisted under the rags she gathered in the marketplace and wove into ropes to sell.

  Some people crossed themselves as they passed the bottega, a few spat; others left small offerings for the pregnant Madonna. Lucrezia took the unwelcome attention with as much fortitude as she could muster, squaring her shoulders and trying not to look out the window too often.

  “In time they’ll forget us,” Fra Filippo told her gently. Even when she clapped her hands at a small basket of brown eggs left by the doorstep, he reminded her that in a city so full of sickness, birth, death, and prosperity, the leering eyes of the curious soon would be focused elsewhere, and tongues would
be wagging over someone else’s change of fortune.

  “Of course.” Lucrezia smiled. “And when word comes from Rome, we’ll no longer need to hide,” she added bravely.

  Her composure didn’t crack until the day she saw Paolo passing on the road and waved to him from the doorway.

  “Come inside, you can tell me what you hear from Rosina,” she called, beckoning.

  Paolo hung his head and stayed on the street. Lucrezia pulled a shawl from a hook near the door, and hurried toward him. Heads turned to watch her.

  “I’m sorry,” Paolo said when she’d gotten closer. “Mia madre forbids it.”

  As Fra Filippo predicted, with the coming of carnival that marked the start of Lent, well-wishers and gossipmongers alike stopped haunting the street outside their door. Fat Tuesday was celebrated with a boisterous procession led by Provost Inghirami with a confraternity of Church dignitaries and civic officials from the Comune di Prato. Children danced in the streets, men and women wore masks they’d fashioned by hand or bought from merchants who’d brought them from the shops along the canals of Venice. Everyone feasted, and the air was filled with the scent of roasting pig.

  But there was no fattening of the larder at Fra Filippo’s house, where his silver pieces numbered no more than ten, and Lucrezia woke on the first day of Lent pledging to keep her body from the painter for the forty penitent days of Quaresima.

  “For the child’s sake,” she said, planting a shy kiss on his cheek. “I love you, but I must be strict in my Lenten penance.”

  Her eyes moved in shadow, and Fra Filippo couldn’t read what they said. But he knew she worried for the child’s soul, and agreed that penitence in the time of Lent was always prudent.

  “I’d like to speak with Sister Pureza,” Lucrezia said to Fra Filippo over their small cena that evening. The bells for Nones had rung long ago, and there were ribbons of blue paint running through the monk’s hair. His thoughts were elsewhere, and Lucrezia did her best not to let that discourage her.