by Lisa Hilton
‘Not really.’
‘Just as well I’m here then.’
Florence was beautiful that day. As we wound our way through the straits of the Borgo de Greci, Cecco kept up a stream of information and it was as much as I could do to trot beside him, staring about me, while he explained that his family lived in the gonfalone, or district of the Golden Lion, where the Medici supporters congregated . . . that his father was a notary, connected with one of the big Medici estates, but he had plans for his son to become a scholar and sent him to school, where Maestro Ficino had noticed him – oh, and had I tried a hot tripe roll? . . . The paintings on the walls of the Signoria were of enemies of the Medici who had plotted against them, he continued, and in this bell tower there is a painting of Daedalus by Giotto – did I know who Daedalus was, or Giotto? . . . Piero was nothing to his father Lorenzo, everyone said so . . . Florentines hated all foreigners and foreigners hated them, because they had the best artists and architects and poets in the world – did I know who Botticelli was? – which is why Donna Alfonsina was so unpopular with her proud Roman ways . . . Had I tried the sweets from the nuns of San Nicola, who made comfits for the Medici? . . . This is the bench where Buonarotti had quarrelled with da Vinci – did I know who Buonarotti was? . . . Cecco was learning Greek and would go to Constantinople once the Pope won it back from the Turks, because that was where all the great learning was and then he would have his own room in the palazzo like Maestro Ficino.
At least I had heard of Constantinople, but Cecco was not impressed.
‘God’s a dog if I can understand what Maestro Ficino sees in you. You’re an ignoramus.’
I was shocked at his swearing, but I knew he was only doing it to show off, and that made me like him better, for it meant he was nervous too. The apple stall was to the east of the city, at the foot of the Ponte Rubaconte. I sat on a big stone close to the water and batted off the mosquitoes while Cecco scrambled up the bank. He returned juggling two fat apples, stuffed with ricotta and honey and raisins, the smooth cheese delicious against the scorching, floury flesh. For a while we scooped and slurped, puffing our lips round each mouthful to cool it. I felt braver. Cecco wiped his sticky mouth on a dockleaf and looked me in the face.
‘How did you get here then? After that business with the angel?’
‘My father gave me to a woman to look after me when they . . . when they took him. But she sold me.’
‘I know. I’ve seen the account books. They paid fifty florins for you, Maestro Ficino bid it. Well, for the books, really. He thinks you can help him.’
‘But how? I don’t understand what he wants from me.’
‘Well, it’s not just because you’re so funny-looking. Sorry. He thinks your father could raise demons, he wants to do it too. And he thinks you know how, ’cept you’re too dumb to see it.’
I wasn’t sure if I could trust Cecco, but it would come out soon enough.
‘It was a trick. What my father did back in Toledo was just a trick, to save me.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t let him know that. Besides, I saw you in the church, remember, with old Suora whatsername? You put the wind up old Piero good and proper. It was a clever move, that, hiding the palle under those filthy old scraps.’
‘Messr Piero thought it meant something?’
I knew, though. That same creeping coldness was reaching into my throat as I remembered the hollow golden ball, how it cracked on the stones. The symbol of the Medici and their power.
‘I’m no witch!’ I stammered hastily. ‘That was nothing – Margherita is just a fortune-teller. It’s wrong to even think about such things. They burn people for less, in Spain.’
‘Not here. In Florence there’s this monk. Savonarola?’ Cecco shook his head despairingly at my blank expression.
‘Well, he’s very powerful. Some say he’s a fanatic, others a prophet. But old Lorenzo, Piero’s father, had him brought to his death bed just to be sure. So this Savonarola tried to say that Maestro Ficino was a heretic, that his learning was ungodly, but all the scholars in Florence supported him because Maestro Ficino wrote that driving out evil spirits was holy work, and that learning how to do it was true Christian scholarship. So those hounds of God, the Dominicans, were left chasing their tails.’
‘Wisdom and knowledge shall be granted unto thee, and I will give thee riches and wealth and honour such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee, neither shall any after have the like.’ The grim faced priest, the man struggling for his last breaths on the bed, the howling shadow beneath the walls.
‘But magic is wrong, surely? Anyway, I can’t do anything magical. My father just made it look like that.’
Cecco considered me. His face was so young, gawky, the planes not settled into their lines, but his smile was so open and his freckled skin so cheerful that I could see in a while he would be handsome. His face was pleasing to look on. Not like mine.
‘I don’t believe you.’
I thought of my dreams, of the shadows, of my father’s stories of the world beneath the city, of Margherita’s reedy cackle as she told her poor gulls I had the sight.
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, you’ve got a lot to learn if you’re going to keep him happy. And I don’t mind helping if you promise to stop howling the whole time.’
‘Alright,’ I smiled.
‘Besides,’ he added, a note of admiration in his voice, ‘you may be a fool and a cry baby, but I’ve never seen a girl who could fight like you. A proper she-wolf.’
He pulled me to my feet and we began to walk slowly back to the Via Larga, our faces turned up to the silver sunbeams which alighted on the austere façades of the palaces.
CHAPTER SIX
SO CECCO BECAME MY GUIDE THROUGH THIS STRANGE new country that was the upper world of the palazzo. He showed me the statues, Judith cutting off the head of the tyrant Holofernes, David the naked boy in the courtyard, so beautiful that even in death the feather of defeated Goliath’s plumed helmet snakes suggestively up his bare thigh. The great staircase, which had represented the horizon of my world when I belonged to the kitchens, was reduced to a thoroughfare I pattered up and down as confidently as if I were a true Medici. Once we even slid all the way down its polished, pompous length. We chattered on the outdoor benches, tracing their delicate walnut intarsia with idle fingers, as Cecco proudly explained the history of the family – how they were so rich that they were known as God’s own bankers, how all the princes of Italy revered them and how, thanks to the Medici, there had been a time of peace and wealth in Italy such as had not been seen since the days of the Romans.
I did not quite believe him. I remembered Piero’s anxious face on the church porch, the prophecy from the tamburo, that image of a cold shadow clawing at the heart of the palazzo. As summer slowly freshened into autumn, the house was as busy as ever; but in the streets there were rumours of complaints against Piero, of scuffles between Medici clients and their critics, and almost every day there were messengers from Milan, with talk of an alliance made by the Sforza duke with the hunchback king of the French.
There was much talk too of the monk Savonarola, returned from preaching in Bologna where he had dared to criticise Donna Ginevra, wife of the Bentivoglio lord, as a painted whore. Savonarola spoke of fires and scourges that would overtake Florence, of God’s revenge that would descend on the city from over the Alps.
And I dreamed my dream of the young man in the velvet mask, looking out over the teeming night city, and each time I dreamed it seemed he turned his head a fraction closer, as though next time, next time, I might see the source of that lazy, patient smile.
Each morning, I went to Maestro Ficino’s scrittoio, where he perched behind his desk, huge as all Medici furniture seemed to be huge, with Cecco working away behind him, never giving a hint that we were friends. As the old scholar talked and questioned, I realised how much I had absorbed from my papa in those quiet days – that, in fact, I understood much of
what the Maestro spoke of. My papa had believed in the practical qualities of things, that certain plants or spices could be used to cure people, but that their powers, their properties, were in turn influenced by the stars, and that if one knew this, one could shape and control nature itself.
And from my mother I knew other things, vivid in my dreams and as clear and real as my memories of Toledo. Some of them I tried to describe to Maestro Ficino, who listened avidly. I told him a dream of tall, fair men, beautiful men, their bodies wound all over with strange blue markings, who came in long ships with fires at their prows. The Maestro nodded and scribbled as I spoke of the northmen, the fire-worshippers. He took a slate and scratched out three triangles, arranged in a larger triangle and asked me if I knew what that was, the mark of a victim to be sacrificed to Odin, the name of the old Northern god. So I told him of a dream where I had seen these marks, inked on the bodies of men and women who dangled from the trees of a forest where I walked, swaying like great fruits, so many that they made a forest of their own. I told him that I dreamed of strange shapes, a sort of writing, etched into the palms of these men. I began to understand that he believed the key to his searches was in the old magic, as he called it, the magic that the northmen had brought with them to Spain, and that this was why I, and my father’s books, were so precious to him. He spoke of sorcerers, drunk with the power of magic which they called the seid. They could cross into the lands of the dead, these conjurors; they could see the future. So I told him what I believed he wanted to hear, whatever it would take to keep my new place in the palazzo, but I did not speak much of my dreams of wolves, of my mother or of the black man, for those things seemed too real to me to be consigned to the fond fancies of his notebook.
When I considered what Maestro Ficino had recognised in me, I knew that Margherita had seen it too. Her grullo tales of wood ladies and mermaids suddenly seemed to make sense, and there appeared little difference, to me, between her harmless conjurings and the more august researches of the Maestro, for all that hers were cast from a bundle of rubbish and his with the latest instruments that scholarship could provide. She too had believed in the powers of nature, like ginger in crystals to heat the blood, that a menstruating woman would cloud a mirror, that vinegar could cool a husband’s temper or asparagus rouse him to ardour.
Why then had Piero de Medici chosen to go to Margherita in his fear instead of his household magus? I saw little of Piero, and what I did see I could not like. I saw that he was lazy, that he left most of the work to his secretary Bibbiena, and a roomful of scribes; that he was vain, caring more for ordering new clothes to show off his fine physique; and that he was proud, believing the Medici to be as great as his wife’s family, the Orsini, who had been grand in Rome for centuries while the Medici were no better than peasants in the marshy countryside of the Mugello. Oh, he liked to play the scholar, determined to show the world he was as great and discerning a critic of the new arts as his father Lorenzo had been. But I could see his eyes wandering when he came to discourse with Maestro Ficino, trying to catch a glimpse of his latest velvet coat in the reflection of a brass bowl; and I pitied my teacher then, for I saw that for all their learning, the scholars of the Medici household were just another sort of slave, bound to their books for their living as I had been bound to the greens and the sacks of capers.
Why then had Piero indulged Maestro Ficino in his protection of me? I should have liked to speak to Cecco of these things, but it never seemed to come out right. His worship of Piero was as complete as his conviction of my own odd specialness, however much I tried to convince him that I knew nothing, could do nothing. In Cecco’s mind, the fact that Piero had needed me made it so. And I knew that I was strange. What was it that had so frightened the people in the marketplace, that had convinced my father I could execute the trick that bought my life, that made Adara so keen to abandon me? And I thought of the travelling people and the poor, sorry wolf, and how I had made him come to me.
One afternoon after dinner, when the house was quiet, I stole tentatively into Donna Alfonsina’s rooms. She and her ladies would be resting, I thought, and if not I could invent an errand – for though I saw her often, sweeping like a proud ghost through the palazzo, she did not know me. All of us in the household moved on our own trajectories, like clockwork dolls, crossing paths occasionally but always proceeding along our proper course. Her chambers were on the floor above Piero’s, a long suite of painted rooms glowing vivid as a jewel box. There was a scent of apple wood from the fire and fine incense, and my feet moved silently, cushioned by a thick crimson Turkey carpet. Other carpets were spread along a table and benches, their colours picked out in a row of silver basins ranged on a shelf. There were several books, embroidery frames and instruments scattered about, and I smiled at myself that I had once thought the salon above a brothel in Toledo a palace. Everything in this warm, luxurious space hummed quietly with money. In the corner of the antechamber was a huge mirror, from Venice, I thought, the city of water where the most beautiful glass in the world was made. Standing before it, I took off my cloak and my old red dress and my shift, and looked at myself naked, as I had never done before.
I was a poor thing, that was for sure. My hip bones and collarbones poked out, I could work my fist in the gap between my thighs, though I turned my eyes shyly from the smooth place between my legs. I was all straight lines and angles. I knew enough from my time with Margherita of some men’s desires, that they preferred their own sex to the other, though my mind shied away from those foul moments with the gentleman in Adara’s house. I was a between thing, I thought, and that was why they had dressed me as a boy. ‘Changeling’, they called me. Well, I thought, there was time for growing, and I tried to find my papa’s voice, my papa who had told me I was beautiful, special. He must have loved me very much, I thought, to say such things with the evidence of my ugliness plain before his eyes. I sighed a little as I dropped my shift over my meagre limbs and thought I would pay a visit to Margherita. Perhaps amongst her ‘kindnesses’ there might be something to make a girl into a woman. Besides, I had meant to visit for a long time, ashamed of myself that I had neglected her. At dinner, when we were served a sweet frittata with candied cherries, I cut off a slice and wrapped it in a cloth for her.
Winter was coming on and the lost heat of the summer was almost unimaginable now that the city had sunk in freezing, icy mist. I made my way to Santo Spirito through a ghost city, the fog so thick and white that the streets vanished a few yards before me. Only the lanterns in the tabernacles at the corners – lighted early to guide the bumping, cursing citizens – helped me down to the river. Margherita was not there, nor was there any sign of her precious heap of smelly treasures. I thought perhaps the chill had driven her away, to a snugger roosting place, and I looked around me to ask after her, holding my drooping slice of omelette like a torch. A barrow man came up out of the mist, the heavy wheels of his laden handcart almost crushing my boots, and I jumped back, recognising the cricket seller who had handed over my gift that last spring. I asked him politely if he had any news of Suora Margherita and he answered me twisting his cap, taking me for a young lady in my new clothes, not recognising the shock-headed sprite in the gaudy necklace who had kept company with the wise woman.
‘If you’ve come to ask something of her, miss, it’s too late. She’s been gone a month or so now.’
‘Gone where, if you please?’
‘Hell, I imagine, begging your pardon. Or the Bargello at least.’
I knew of the dungeon beneath the fortress of the Bargello. Cecco had told me about the tiny cells there, the prisoners who wasted away for years without a glimpse of sunlight.
‘But why? What had she done? She meant no harm.’
The man leaned towards me and tapped his nose confidentially.
‘Enemies in high places, miss. It was Piero’s men what came for her, curse him for a tyrant. You could try Donna Ciliego, over at Santa Annunziata, I’ve heard she’s ver
y good.’
I stared after him as he heaved his barrow across the deserted piazza, vanishing into the thick whiteness. Margherita had known Piero. She had known, as I had not, the significance of that little shattered ball. And perhaps the Medici fortunes were doubtful enough for it to be unwise even to let a crazy old conjuror who lived in a doorway speak freely. Poor, poor Margherita. I regretted that I had not sought her out sooner, but I knew well that I was too insignificant to have done anything to save her. I saw too that Piero was ruthless, and that his fear would make him cruel. As I trailed back to the palazzo, I thought angrily on how little we mattered to the great people, who thought human beings could be owned and discarded like broken tools.
I told Cecco that I thought Margherita had been locked up, but he refused to believe it. She would be back with the swallows, he told me, and said I should not mind it.
‘Besides, it’s not Ser Piero’s fault,’ he said stoutly, ‘the people are stupid. They want tournaments and feasts and all suchlike nonsense, and because Ser Piero can’t pay for that they go listening to that creep Savonarola.’ Piagnoni, he called the Florentines, snivellers.
Piero was unpopular in Florence. There were many who resented the Medici merchants who had set themselves up as princes. And the city was threatened, Cecco said, by the Milanese and the French.
‘Why Milan?’ I asked. We were sharing the sweet omelette, there seemed no point in wasting it.
Cecco sighed and rolled his eyes. He enjoyed reminding me of my ignorance. ‘The Duke of Milan is a halfwit. They say he lives in filth, with only his dogs for company. Milan is ruled by his uncle, Lodovico. They call him Il Moro – moor, like you.’
The idiot boy, he explained, cared nothing for his position so long as the uncle kept him supplied with pleasures; but his wife, a princess of Naples, who certainly did care for her dignity, was outraged that Lodovico’s son was treated as the heir to Milan rather than her own boy.
