“You are such…” she said.
And that’s when his finger found the ring upon her hand.
All their words dried up in the parched desert of her reality.
Yet he took a step closer, stood inches from her. “Mona Viviana del Marrone, you are like no woman I have ever met,” Sansone’s voice was the low sung song of yearning; his head lowered yet closer…and stopped, “but you are another man’s wife and I…I…”
Viviana squeezed his hand, demanding him to finish, feeling the same bitter angst that broke his strong voice.
Sansone straightened. She watched the battle within as he brought himself under control; in the act, he won her respect and broke her heart. “But I would not want my mother to have to stand on a chair and hit me yet again.”
Viviana had sniffed a small laugh, had smiled a broken smile, and had let him lead her away from what could be, to what was.
She looked back up to the corner of the Palazzo Bartolini and saw the same disarmingly charming grin upon Sansone’s ruddy countenance, as if he had journeyed back in time with her, as if, though they were a row of large homes apart, they were together once more upon the balcony beneath the stars.
He dipped his head, a barely perceptible nod and, as if seeing her arrive home were his cue, he stepped gracefully and swiftly away, disappearing around the corner with two strides of his long legs.
Viviana breathed once more, and entered her house, no longer afraid.
Chapter Ten
“Inner Truths must be well tended and well guarded.”
She stood, alone, a stranger in her own house, in her own world. She turned about her sitting room as if it belonged to another.
Viviana dropped herself into her chair by the window. For a brief, warm moment, she burrowed into it, hiding. In the space of aloneness, in this treasured place, she allowed herself to be grateful for Orfeo’s continued absence.
Her body prickled with numbness; her head swam. She had barely eaten in two days and the lack of food abetted her weakness. Viviana knew what was happening to her, knew she was the rock upon the shore, pounded by waves ferocious with a storm.
Beneath the quilt her nonni had made as a wedding present, the cassone stood in almost absolute anonymity. There were storage chests in every room of a Florentine house; it was where all things were kept, it was yet another symbol of a family’s status. This one belonged to Viviana alone.
Purpose filled her; refuge was within her grasp, and perhaps Lapaccia’s salvation as well. Viviana stood, rushed across the room, and unveiled the forziere from its protective garb. Wanting both comforts, she pulled the storage box across the room to sit beside the chair.
Viviana opened the trunk, releasing the two heavy clasps with a creak of metal, a groan of old wood disturbed. The heavy and earthy smell of the dark wood filled her senses, calming her nerves.
Her secrets lay within the exquisitely hammered metal interior, all save one, and she gazed upon them as one does jewels. Reaching in, Viviana brought out the small string of prayer beads. So like the Christian rosary, it was shorter in length and ended with a triquetra, a continuous line forming three pointed ovals, a symbol of the connection of mind, body, and soul.
She squeezed the amulet in the palm of her hand, much as she did whenever Orfeo mistreated her. Viviana trembled with fear should Orfeo ever find this chest and all that lay within it; how badly he would punish her then. There would be no prayers for such salvation.
With quivering hands, Viviana spied the most precious items. Placing the beads and amulet in her lap, she leaned over and picked up the first leather bound book. She brought the tome to her nose and breathed deeply of the smooth and worn buckskin, the musty yet appealing smell of leather more than fifty years old. It had all begun with this, this diary and the others accompanying it.
As always, Viviana opened the book delicately, with respect for its age, its origins, and its contents. With the pad of her index finger she ran her hand over the three words on the first page, caressed them as she would a beloved’s face.
Caterina dei Vigri
Viviana held the book to her chest, eyes rising to the wall opposite and the painting upon it. In the flat, lifeless style of the era in which Caterina worked, the central figure of Ursula loomed large with her crown of gold. With both hands, the saint unfurled her cloak trimmed with ermine, revealing two groups of kneeling virgins, hands clasped together in prayer, heads anointed with their own crowns. Few knew the painting that once hung above the nun’s bed, and which now hung above Viviana’s settee, was the work of a woman named Caterina. Those few who did were the members of the special guild, her group pledged to continue Caterina’s work.
Though she had only met the cousin but a time or two, Viviana’s father had told her of his dead sister’s daughter.
The dei Vigri family was of the great noble clans of Bologna. Caterina’s father Giovanni had served as ambassador to Niccolò, the Marchese of Ferrara. Giovanni’s was a loving heart; his was an open mind when it came to his daughter’s education. Taught to read and write, in her dialect as well as in Latin, taught to play an instrument and to sing, and tutored in the skill of paint and illumination, the shy and fragile child was nevertheless woefully unskilled at the ways of courtly life, despite growing up at the court of Ferrara. Her spirit showed no signs of becoming a worldly woman, and when her father died, the fourteen-year-old girl found herself adrift.
Though ingenuous, Caterina was not unwise, and she knew the only place suitable for her. She entered the convent of Poor Clares of Corpus Domini, a popular retreat for the well-born women of Ferrara. There she remained for the rest of her life, chosen as abbess when Poor Clares colonized in Bologna, and remained so until her death a few years ago.
It was in this cloistered environment—this protective atmosphere—that the shy girl prospered and thrived into a talented and benevolent woman. Here Caterina discovered that her true gift lay not only in her piety, but in her hands, hands able to wield a paint-soaked brush with the prowess of a master. Such mastery Caterina brought upon herself, through years and years of practice and experimentation. Such learning Caterina had documented, in the very journals Viviana possessed: the one in her hand, and the five more in the chest.
The day Caterina’s diaries—her treatises and recipes for the composition of pigments—were delivered to Viviana, her only living relative, was the day Viviana’s life changed forever.
She had been floundering, much as Caterina had. Her sons were grown and gone, out and about and living their own lives, and though they spared many an hour for their mother, they needed her less. Their absence had thrown Viviana into a void, one of aimlessness other women seemed to embrace with little compunction. Even now, amidst all the lunacy possessing her world, Viviana wondered if she would have embraced her newfound purpose with such rigor if her marriage to Orfeo were different. Blessings are so often disguised as curses.
Isabetta. The woman leapt into Viviana’s mind. Not the cynical woman so at war with the hardships life had thrown at her, but the vibrant, vivacious character—once like Viviana, the wife of a wealthy merchant—who had crooned with enchantment when Viviana had shown her the diaries. From that moment on, things had moved quickly. Isabetta brought Mattea Zamperini, when Isabetta came upon Mattea drawing in a church. Mattea, who worked as a talented embroiderer, enticed Natasia Soderini to the fold after the noblewoman had shown Mattea some sketches for fabric embroidery she wished to commission. Natasia recruited Fiammetta while Lapaccia Cavalcanti came at the invitation of Fiammetta. They were among the richest and the poorest of the city; more than thirty years spanned the ages of the youngest to the oldest. It didn’t matter. None of it.
Together they would learn and master their craft, work toward the same goal: to one day know the same joy Giotto and Masaccio, Celini and Botticelli knew, to embrace art as a discipline, not as a frivolous pastime. One day they would be free to sign their work and show it to the world.
> Viviana jerked upward—her revelry broken—at the sounds of voices, male voices, in the empty warehouse of the ground floor.
“Jemma!” she cried, jumping up, protruding eyes searching the room for some form of weapon. She grabbed the heavy vase from the table by her chair, dumping the flowers and their water on the floor with no regard even as the footsteps sounded on the stairs below, as the voices grew closer.
Chapter Eleven
“Yearning finds us all, in all its forms.”
Few people gave notice to the plainly-dressed woman hurrying down the Via delle Caldaie, crossing the Via Santa Maria to the Via Romana, leading not only through, but out of the Porta San Piero Gattolino.
For the first time when making this retreat, Isabetta scanned the road behind and before her, fearful any should see her hurried get-away. Such action could be seen as escape, escape as guilt; but it was only the truth of her own existence from which she ran.
Once beyond the battlemented gate, Isabetta quickly stepped off the road in favor of the narrow, well-trod path beckoning from the right. It was one she had taken on many occasions, telling no one she was going. She never did on such sojourns.
Her step became a scamper. Her need to find release from her worries, greater with the disappearance of her friend, urged her on. Scurrying now, her breath grew labored as softly rolling meadow turned to hill.
Unlike much of the surrounding landscape, where hundreds of villas jutted from their tucks in the cliffside, or where the vineyards and olive groves drew lines upon their faces, this hill was as it was born, wild with whatever nature decided should grow upon it. Outcroppings of rock shared space with bright tufts of newly sprouting grass speckled with the purples and yellows of fresh blooms.
Isabetta climbed the first hill and turned round. From here, she could see her city sprawled out like a tapestry of golden and russet threads laid upon the earth. Enclosed by gigantic walls portioned off between twelve mammoth gates, the city—once nothing more than an encampment of the great Julius Caesar in the years before the birth of Christ—Florentina, the Latin word for flourishing, had become a magnificent citadel, cleaved in two by the gently curving Arno River. The Black Death had taken many, yet her home still boasted one of the largest populations in the world, as much or more than the places she read about: Rome, Milan, and somewhere called Lon-don, such a strange sounding word. Like a bird wafting above, her gaze scanned the mosaic below her and she could not help but wonder what magic lay in the few miles between these walls.
Was it something in the water they drank or the air they breathed? Some otherworldly singularity creating so many extreme talents in one place? Dante, Petrarch, Donatello, Boccaccio, Giotto…all gone now, but not their influences—their legacies. Alberti, Brunelleschi, Botticelli. Painters, sculptors, writers, architects—the greatest the world had ever produced—all within these walls. How many more untold talents were there? She knew the work the sisterhood produced, knew more than some of it belonged on the walls beside those of Giotto, in sculptor gardens next to a Donatello, denied their glory by the feminine hands creating it. It blossomed within the confines of these city walls still, like a grape that had weathered a frost.
Isabetta crested the hill, entering the loving arms of the forest. She snuggled through the short and full bay laurels. She ducked beneath the prickly branches of the pines, twirling about them with one hand on their rough, thick trunks as if she danced a canario with them.
She climbed and climbed some more, until the tall, fuzzy firs hid her within their protective branches and the gurgling of the stream—her stream—beckoned her to the top of the tallest hill. It was a copse where the stream bubbled up from the earth and the trees formed a protective circle around it. It was nature’s fountain. She esteemed it as a religious zealot would the most beautiful of altars. It was her favorite place in the world, where earth met sky, and sky met water. It was her place, belonging only to—
She saw him then.
How dare he? It was a ferocious scream in her head.
On the almost perfectly flat, jutting rock daring to hang a few inches above the stream’s head, he sat. He sat upon her seat.
She suffered a personal violation; to have someone—anyone—in the one place she felt pure private ownership, the one place where she escaped all without fear of discovery or interruption, his presence was an assault upon her as surely as a fist to her gullet.
It was a man, she was still certain of it, but his hair belonged on a woman—long, light brown, shot with hints of red, silkily beautiful, falling to his mid-back in gentle waves. He was slim but powerful; she could see the broadness of his shoulders and the sinew of his arms, even under the gray knee-length tunic of substandard linen and the equally shoddy wool mantle he wore. He was tall, for he had to curl his legs beneath him, where she could let hers dangle without threat of touching the water.
Isabetta’s forehead crinkled. What sort of man wore a tunic and an overgown? It was the typical dress of an older man, though she could tell, by the smoothness of the skin on his hands, that this was a youthful man. In truth, it was his hands capturing her gaze. Long, lissome, and slender fingers moved with a grace she found both strange and sensuous.
Upon his lap sat a small wooden cage, flat bottomed, oval topped, and made of the slimmest of willow wood. She had seen many such contrivances in the market place, where the wealthy bought birds for pets. Inside it, Isabetta saw three softly cooing doves.
With his nimble hands, the man opened the small rectangular gate and held the cage itself on the edge of his knees. With coaxing mutters the man charmed the birds from their prison. The doves launched themselves from the edge of the cage, lifting effortlessly into the air with a graceful flapping of their feathers.
“Do you see it?” the man spoke, voice thick. “Do you see the muscles in their wings, stretching up along their necks?”
He turned then, blue-gray eyes glowing.
“It is a wonder of creation,” Isabetta said, not an iota of fear to be alone with a strange man in the woods.
“You are a lover of nature too, sì, signorina?”
Isabetta turned from the flight of the doves with a dip of her chin and a small smile. It had been some time since anyone addressed her as signorina; her vanity delighted in it.
“I…I…yes, I do,” she replied, “I feel a part of it, a part of something…bigger…bigger than me, bigger than us all.”
“You are, perhaps, a follower of the Sacred Goddess?” the man asked, such a personal question, such a dangerous question; Isabetta flinched back, only for a moment.
“Among other things, yes, I am.”
“Ah,” the man said, turning back round and setting aside the now empty cage for another object. “It is well for you.”
Moving closer, she took a place upon a large rock beside him. And gasped.
Upon the man’s lap lay a fine piece of vellum, thick and stretched smooth; in his hand was a piece of trimmed and pointed charcoal. He held it delicately, though he worked it furiously upon the vellum. Before her eyes, the doves returned. Quickly, but precisely, he created the birds in flight, the movement of the wings witnessed again.
“You are an artist,” Isabetta announced in a breathy whisper.
The man snorted with amusement. “So they tell me, signorina. In truth, I am many things or only one, a simple human being.” He finished the sketch of the bird’s neck with the wisp of a few strokes and turned.
Isabetta saw now the fineness of his features—smooth, pale golden skin lay upon high-set, prominent cheekbones and a long, slim, arched nose. His dark brows and lashes made the paleness of his eyes all the more striking. For the first time in a very long while, Isabetta felt something, something she thought lost forever…desire.
“Do you appreciate art, signorina?”
“Fioravanti. I am Isabetta Fioravanti.” She heard it, the untold truth; it was a very small dagger.
“Signorina Fioravanti,” the man took her
hand, and from his sitting position, bowed elegantly over it. “I am Leonardo, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci.”
If she had been standing, she would have stumbled; if she had been speaking, she would have stuttered. The name of da Vinci echoed on the streets of Florence, in the artistic circles and on the tongues of spiteful gossips, for some time now, two years or more. And here he sat, in her favorite of places. It seemed destined.
“Sì, Signore da Vinci, I have a profound appreciation of art, including yours,” Isabetta proclaimed with calm boldness.
He gave her the shy smile again, easily seen between the clipped mustache and the full flowing beard. “You know me?”
Isabetta settled her back against a rocky outcropping. It would take a ferocious event to pry her away from this man and this meeting. “The Angel.”
The man snorted again, softly through his slim nostrils, still smiling; small and charming, it was a pleased expression.
With his father’s blessing and assistance, Leonardo had left the small hamlet of Vinci for the city of Florence a little over a decade ago. Apprenticed to Andrea di Cione where he lived and worked, the young Leonardo learned quickly. Verrocchio, as di Cione was more commonly known, conducted one of the most highly esteemed studios in all of Florence, but soon found himself overshadowed by his own pupil. The Baptism of Christ, still hanging in the Church of San Salvi, had been a collaboration of master and apprentice, as most studio work was. It was unfortunate for Verrocchio that da Vinci’s small angel in the corner, he who held the robe of Christ, far outshone the rest of the painting. It was rumored Verrocchio had not painted since.
With a twist of fate like a knife in the back, it was the same year as the tragedy, or travesty, of da Vinci’s life, depending on who spoke of it. Leonardo became famous and infamous in the span of a few months. To be known for one’s work and not judged must be pleasing indeed.
Portrait of a Conspiracy Page 6
