Portrait of a Conspiracy

by Donna Russo Morin

  On each side of the tall, thin Gonfaloniere were two members of the Eight, both well-seasoned, faces as hard as she presumed their hearts to be.

  So be it, Viviana thought for a second time and braced herself. She knew now what she could withstand, more than she would ever have imagined.

  “Signora del Marrone,” the Gonfaloniere entered and held out a hand, taking one of hers, surprising her as he bowed over it. She did her best to curtsey though her legs trembled and her hand in his shook. “I have some questions for you.”

  With a tick of his head, they brought the governor a chair and the two took a seat across the small table from each other.

  “I hope I have answers which will please,” Viviana croaked a response.

  “Get the signora some water, if you please,” the Gonfaloniere asked and another soldier, posted outside the door, rushed off to his task, returning just as quickly.

  Viviana drank almost all of it in one gulp, grateful for the tincture of wine cleansing it and giving her strength at the same time.

  “Better?” Cesare Petrucci asked.

  “Sì, better.”

  “Tell me, how long was your husband involved with the Pazzis?”

  Gonfaloniere Petrucci did his job well, dropping the incriminating question on the table between them before she had barely answered his polite one, hoping to jostle her to the truth, no doubt.

  “I had no idea he was involved with the Pazzis, signore.”

  “Come, madonna, surely a wife knows her husband’s secrets,” Petrucci pressed.

  “I tell you true, I have no knowledge of my husband’s involvement with the Pazzi.” Viviana lifted her shoulders and held them there. “I thought he disliked them.”

  The Gonfaloniere smiled, but it was a smirk saying he would not be cajoled by her charm. He barraged her then, with question after question, but they were in fact the same few questions, each time worded slightly differently in an effort to catch her up, to trap her into pronouncing her own guilt. But he never asked her the proper question, never forced her to answer it.

  “And what of your friend, madonna, what of Lapaccia Cavalcanti?”

  Her head snapped up, thinking, in her fatigue, he was telling her they had found Lapaccia.

  “Lapaccia?” Now it was she who demanded information from him. “Is she here? Is she well?”

  Petrucci’s mouth formed a tight line as he sniffed out a breath and slunk back in his chair, clearly disappointed. “She is not. I had hoped you could tell me where she is.”

  Viviana’s shoulders slumped. “I cannot for I know not.”

  The Gonfaloniere sat up quickly, making his move in her lethargy. “Why do you, my lady, sympathize with the Pazzis?”

  She didn’t know if it was the toil of the interrogation, the insensibility her life had taken on since the tragedy, or the insult to her loyalties. But this question Viviana could not—would not—tolerate. She had seen what they had done, every second of it.

  Viviana jumped up, knocking her chair to the floor, grabbed the sides of the small table, and thrust her face within inches of the Gonfaloniere’s, “How dare you? I am a Medicean. Always.”

  The guard inside the door took a step, brought his hand back, and brought the back of it crashing against Viviana’s jaw, a blow so hard it dropped her to the dusty floor like a stone.

  “My husband hits me harder than you.” Derision bristled from her, struck and humiliated though she may be.

  The Gonfaloniere stopped before her. She saw upon his face something she had not seen in the hours he had been questioning her. Belief.

  He reached a hand out and she took it.

  Cesare Petrucci lifted her gently and placed her equally so on the cot.

  “Bring Signora del Mar—”

  “Viviana, please,” she asked of him, not bearing to be called by that name.

  One side of Cesare’s mouth twitched. “Please bring Mona Viviana something to eat,” the Gonfaloniere ordered. To her, he said, “I take my leave of you, madonna.”

  “Gonfaloniere?” she caught him up, for the first time her voice soft and pleading. “If you are to execute me, do not let my sons watch. They have served the Republic and the Medici well. Please, do not let them see.”

  Cesare Petrucci exhaled. “I take my leave of you.”

  With a curt bow, the governor did, leaving Viviana to wonder what would become of her.

  • • •

  She paced the room for the length of the day, light creeping into her cell through the cracks in the roughly hewn door. Viviana walked and walked and walked some more, certain if she had walked a straight line, she would have reached Rome. She had played her part well, given the Gonfaloniere nothing to persecute her for, though she knew that meant nothing in these days.

  “I am not yet ready to die.” As she said the words to the cold stone walls around her, Viviana thought of the children of her children she had yet to hold in her arms, the creations she had yet to paint, love she had yet to know.

  Only then, when no light save that of the single candle illuminated the room, when fear brought her low, did she lay her body on the cot, did she dare close her eyes squeezing out the tears, uncertain if they would open on another dawn.

  They did not.

  A gentle hand upon her shoulder waggled Viviana awake. It was the pitch of the night. He knelt by her rough bed. In the glow of the candle behind him, his hair glowed more wheaten than coppery gold, and she could barely see the features of his face, but she knew him.

  “Leonardo?” It was a perplexed whisper; Viviana wondered if she dreamed his presence.

  “Mona Viviana, ’tis I, indeed.”

  There it was; the smooth, rich timbre of the voice she had listened to for hours as he tutored her from an adequate painter to a fine one.

  She sat up slowly, enervation still a heavy cloak upon her shoulders. “It is you, Leonardo. Whatever are you doing here?”

  “I have come to take you home, madonna.” Declaration made, he stood up and to the side. In doing so, he uncovered yet another figure in the threshold of the small cell, the silhouette of the Gonfaloniere. “Il Magnifico himself has honored you with clemency. He pledges you friendship in exchange for your loyalty.”

  Still in the stupor of somnolence, Viviana could barely understand the incomprehensible, let alone believe it. She did so, though not without a stinging pinch of guilt, for she would save Lapaccia if she could, whatever her friend had done and to whom.

  “We have no more need of your presence, Mona Viviana,” Cesare Petrucci told her. With his next words, his tone dropped precipitously. “However, I must warn you, madonna, if we find you cavort with criminals, not even the favored da Vinci will be able to help you.”

  “If,” the governor continued, “you should have the ear of someone the government cares to speak with, and you inveigle this person to come speak with us, of their own accord, then perhaps both your lives could be forever spared.”

  Viviana nodded. There was little more to hear, nothing more to say.

  Leonardo held her crooked arm by the elbow and the hand as he escorted her from the room. Cesare Petrucci stepped aside to allow them leave, but Viviana stopped.

  Placing a hand upon the Gonfaloniere’s arm, she rose up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, as lightly as the gentlest passing breeze. “Mille grazie, signore.”

  • • •

  Leonardo led her in the strangest path from the Palazzo della Signoria to her home on the Via Porto Rosso. He headed south first, then west on the Borgo S.S. Apostoli.

  Viviana’s step hesitated, lips parting on the surprise of it. She continued on but not without a smile and a shake of her head. “I no longer know the world we live in, my friend.”

  “Nor I,” Leonardo chuckled.

  “But…but I would try to paint it. I hope I may.”

  “You have the talent for it.”

  “It is all I have,” she confessed. “My sons, my art, and our group…they are al
l I have.”

  “What you did, madonna…” Leonardo’s voice trailed off with a distinct chime of admiration, “…you have much more in you than even you know.”

  Viviana thought hard upon his words; she knew she had begun to believe. From an open window of one of the many houses and palazzos they passed, the murmurs of slow, sensual lovemaking fluttered down, voices low and tender, furniture creaking, answered by delighted giggles filled with pleasure.

  “I hope I may always call you friend,” she teased, “even when you have become one of the most famous artists of all the lands.”

  Leonardo sniffed skeptically.

  “Do not scoff,” Viviana chided him. “You are a master, and I think you know it. All the world will be falling at your feet soon enough.”

  “Do not wish it upon me, my lady,” he replied with a note of dark intensity.

  “There will be many who will admire you, men and women,” Viviana continued, but she did so as if to brace him for what she saw ahead, as he braced her, turning north on the Via Tornabuoni, but two blocks from her home. “Many, like Isabetta.”

  “She loves me for my beauty, naught more,” Leonardo said bitterly. “Nor is she the first.”

  “We all love beauty.”

  “She does not accept who I really am.”

  Viviana shook her head. “Isabetta loves and accepts you for exactly who you are. What she cannot accept is that she cannot have you.”

  They turned the corner onto the Via Porto Rosso and Viviana tripped, her strength abandoning her even as she would rush ahead at the sight of her door and her home.

  “Almost now, almost,” Leonardo said, an arm firmly at her waist as she hurried forward.

  The door opened, even as they were steps away.

  “O Dio, grazie, Dio mio,” Viviana cried her thanks to God as the two young men rushed out the door, as she lunged out of Leonardo’s arms and into those of her sons.

  She covered their bristly faces with kisses as they held her tightly, leading led her to the door.

  But she stopped at the threshold, turned, and rushed back to her savior.

  Viviana threw her arms about Leonardo. And though the top of her head reached his chin, she squeezed him with all the might she had left, cheek pressed against his chest as his arms came around her back. She pulled back, rose on tiptoes, and kissed him on his full soft lips, delighted by the stunned smile she left upon them.

  • • •

  “Sleep deeply and worry free, madre mia,” Marcello told her. “We’ll be here when you awake.”

  “We will be here for a few days. We will take care of you,” Rudolfo assured her.

  Viviana heard them through the buzz of exhaustion, as she watched them tiptoe from her room through the slits in her eyes.

  As the door closed behind them, she thanked whatever greatness had blessed her with such sons. She wondered and worried, as her mind grew more and more muddled with the onset of sleep, would she tell them the truth…should she?

  These were not her last thoughts. Her last thoughts of the night she saved for Lapaccia. Gonfaloniere Petrucci had made the situation clear and simple: if the government found Lapaccia, Lapaccia may be killed; if Viviana found Lapaccia and did nothing, they could both be killed. The answer to it all lay with Lapaccia, her knowledge and the reason for her actions. The question followed Viviana into the deepest of sleep…

  How could she save them both?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “To some, make a forever farewell and good riddance too.”

  The unseasonable chill was a pall upon the late spring day; it wrapped itself about the city in the guise of a mist rising up and spreading over them from the Arno, smudging the bright city as if rubbed with charcoal.

  Isabetta and Mattea had taken to spending more and more time together; the sharing of trauma will either bind souls or thrust them apart forever. Mattea rarely took to the streets without Isabetta by her side these days, and then she would only do so if she were to meet him, an occurrence far more rare now than ever before.

  “I spent yesterday morn at the studio,” Mattea told her companion as they walked toward the Mercato.

  Isabetta pulled back, a bird with feathers ruffled. “You did? Why did you not come and get me?”

  Mattea shrugged; she could not tell the truth of it, that she had been looking for some sign, some word, of him, but what she said was not far from it. “I just needed some time to sit by myself. It has become so much more, since—”

  “Since we created our masterpiece,” Isabetta finished the sentence without any of the guile holding Mattea’s tongue.

  “Yes, it’s true,” Mattea giggled, “I believe it of myself more. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Isabetta replied. “When you are told your whole life you cannot do something, you will, of course, believe it, whether it’s true or not.”

  Isabetta stopped their stroll along the Lungarno. “But when you do something, with your mind, your own hands, that contradicts this belief, shatters it, then it becomes a truth none can gainsay.”

  Mattea smiled, nodding as she inhaled deeply of the pungent, fresh scent of the river, the air of the new world she had come to inhabit. “I so look forward to our next meeting. It is but two days hence. Viviana should be recovered by then.”

  “I believe she will.” They continued east, heading for the Ponte Vecchio, where they would turn northward, into the city.

  “Sometimes I wonder if anyone—what is that?” Mattea stopped mid-sentence. “What is that ruckus?”

  Isabetta heard it too then, her eyes rolling heavenward. Who knew what to expect in these days replete with aberrations?

  It was a crowd, yet another, but this time a cheering one, though that did not guarantee anything resembling gaiety. The crowds had become as bloodthirsty as their government.

  The two young women allowed the commotion to direct their sight and suddenly they took note of the throng gathering at the river’s edge, far down the end of the straight lane, near the last bridge to cross the Arno.

  “Were they there before?” Isabetta asked.

  Mattea shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Her mind had been so full of their words, so thick with the paint she had plied on her latest work, she had seen nothing around them.

  “Come,” Isabetta roused her, pulling her along.

  Caught up in the tangle of converging citizenry, the slim women somehow finagled their way closer to the river’s edge, where the voices and the people charged. Squeezing between some large men, hands blackened from layers of dye, the friends saw the cause of congestion.

  At the very shore of the river, where water met bank, a gaggle of young giovani, long sticks in hand, fished, but it was nothing edible they caught.

  “Is it…?” Isabetta began.

  “Oh dear, no, it cannot be,” Mattea mumbled.

  But as the fiendish boys pulled the body out of the water, there was no denying its identity, even though its flesh was more than half decomposed and missing. Once more the presence of Jacopo de’ Pazzi made itself known in the city of Florence.

  “Wherever did he come from?” Isabetta spat.

  “They found him snagged there,” one of the men beside her answered, pointing to a branch, more like half a tree, which had fallen into the river. “They’ve been trying to pull him out for some time now.”

  Mattea’s pale blue eyes grew wide. “Why?”

  The man popped his shoulders up then down. “Why not?”

  Though both girls wanted nothing more than to run in the opposite direction, neither found their feet accommodating. They watched as the giovani untangled the remains from the river, pieces of flesh rippling off it with an odd grace in the weightlessness of the water.

  The gang dislodged the body and yanked it onshore, standing round it, talking animatedly, gesticulating wildly.

  Though Mattea and Isabetta could not hear their words, neither doubted that whatever these r
apscallions decided, it would not be pleasant.

  As the gang rushed away, their grisly prize rolled into a snatched sheet dragged behind them, the thick crowd followed.

  “I cannot…” Mattea muttered.

  “Nor can I.”

  There they stood, ballasts against an ill wind, trying hard not to listen to the sounds of humans behaving inhumanly. Yet all too soon they returned.

  This time, when the giovani dumped the body once more in the Arno, the boys followed it, from each side of the river. With the long sticks they had used to haul the body out, they now used to keep the body in, pushing it offshore should it draw near the bank, as the man’s lifeless tentacles reached out to the river grass as if to grasp it and pull itself out. Their game brought them, and the crowd, to where the river widened, to its vomiting mouth with its strong current.

  Cries of “farewell” and “never return” launched the body into the strong pull of the water that would carry it toward Pisa and out to the sea.

  “Though I may, someday, paint this, today I would see no more,” Mattea said, pulling Isabetta away.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “A new world can only be built on common ground.”

  Marcello shook his head of dark curls. “You dreamed it, surely. It is far too fanciful a tale to be true.”

  Viviana chastised with a shake of a finger. “You question your mother’s veracity?”

  “It is just…I…you…” her son blundered.

  “I know, my dear,” she chuckled. “I would not believe it did it not happen to me.”

  She threw back a chalice, taking a deep, long chug, spying the faces of her boys over the rim of the goblet—the surprised grins, the brows raised in admiration. No doubt they thought only they had the knack for tossing back spirits. “The Medici are surprisingly amiable to me now. I believe there is great forgiveness and friendship to be had there. It will help us all I think.” Viviana saw no reason to cite the conditions of such an alliance.