Wolves in Winter

by Lisa Hilton

  I cared nothing for it. I wished to learn nothing more from him. I wished only to make myself as numb as I had once been in the kitchens of the palazzo, and I wondered what had become of the folk there, now they were fled, and often wished myself among them. Better that I had never been found, never been brought to the scrittoio, for then Cecco might have lived.

  Maestro Ficino set himself to writing letters, searching out news of the family. He found a lad from the village along the hill to carry them and a nag to carry him. By and by, the people round about sought to make amends for what had been done to the villa, or perhaps they were merely afraid of a time when Piero might come to his own again, for I began to find little offerings laid out on the kitchen threshold, a few eggs, a loaf of new bread.

  I thought it unlikely that Piero would ever return to Tuscany, even less so that he would remember his precious scholar lost in the countryside. He was at Bologna, he was at Venice, Donna Alfonsina had torn the rings from her fingers to pay him an army, but the Medici jewels were locked up in the Signoria and the French had taken what the Florentines had overlooked. And when the hunchback king marched on to Rome, God called on Savonarola, the monk of San Marco, to govern Florence, that it might be a righteous city, cleansed of the taint of the Medici tyrants. All this we learned from the letters that trickled in from the Maestro’s correspondents all over Italy, but I paid scant attention.

  To work and then to sleep and to bring no trouble was all I thought on.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DAYS WENT BY AND I BARELY SPOKE TO MY master. I tied my head in a cloth and went to the woods each day. There were mushrooms and garlic root for eating, and I found other things, some of which I had seen on my walks with my father. I gathered comfrey and alder to soothe the skin, dock and fern, radish root and fennel bulb, rosemary and sage, hyssop and mint. I went down to the vegetable gardens and saw that they could still flourish, when the spring came, that there would be figs, perhaps white peaches and rose petals for cordial. There was a fountain in the cortile, a naked boy holding a fish, where I gathered water lilies to stew the roots into a tea which staved away dreams. It gave me a bitter smile to think that once I had sought refuge in sleep. I scoured out the larder and set my herbs to dry there, so that gradually their sweetness covered the lingering stench of smoke. Careggi was more silent than a convent, but the peace did not soothe me. If I moved every moment I was awake, and swigged at my swamy tea like a barbone in a tavern, then I could check the remorse; but in the few moments between lying down and the opiate’s curtain falling, my head was wild with ragged, unbearable screams.

  A cart arrived, laden with boxes and bales of linen. Maestro Ficino came to me in the garden, his eyes dancing with excitement. I was prodding at the claggy yellow earth with a hoe, trying to dig a runnel to plant cabbage seeds.

  ‘Ser Giovanni, he’s coming! Look, he has written, he says he is coming here, to Careggi.’

  I remembered the young man at the ball, Piero’s cousin, who had betrayed him. I supposed he would be master here now.

  ‘Well, I hope he brings some supplies. There’s next to nothing for us, let alone a fine gentleman’s servants,’ I said sourly.

  ‘Yes, yes of course, Mora. I’m sure Ser Giovanni will set everything to rights. But do you not see? He is coming, he will bring books, instruments. It will be like the old days. I shall go on with my work!’

  I had heard plenty of the old days at Careggi, in the time of Piero’s father, when a whole academy of scholars filled the villa, where the talk was all of Plato and magic and the old learning. I was sick of it.

  ‘I’m glad for you, sir, I’m sure,’ I answered, like a proper servant.

  ‘No, Mora, you do not see. There was not time in Florence, I found you too late. I told you I had brought you for a reason.’

  He was moving towards me, with an odd look in his eyes.

  ‘What? What reason?’

  His gaze moved along my body. I had put away my old draggled red dress, it was hardly decent and I feared to spoil it further. I wore a pair of breeches I had found in the stables and a torn linen cloth tied about me like a shirt. The copper skin of my ankles showed above my boots.

  ‘I will explain everything to you, Mora. But first, if you would,’ his old voice grew wheedling, ‘we should go indoors. I would have you undress.’

  I thought he had run mad. And then I thought I knew all about that, and there would be no yellow silk cushions stifling me this time. I picked up my hoe and held it in front of me.

  ‘For shame, sir! Do not come closer to me, or I shall strike you, I shall do it! And I’m sorry I saved you, I should have left you to burn.’

  My eyes were brimming with hot tears, I could not believe that my quiet master should use me so. I was angry, so angry that I wanted to tear at him with my teeth. Maestro Ficino looked puzzled, then he stepped back with his eyes full of pity.

  ‘You do not know? Mora, I am sorry. I had thought . . .’

  ‘Thought what?’ I yelled. ‘Thought what? You take me and you keep me like a fairground creature and I work for you and I understand nothing and Cecco, Cecco.’

  I was weeping now, sobbing with fury, and he reached out a tentative hand and touched my shoulder.

  ‘I am truly sorry. Come, I mean you no harm, Mora. No harm. Come and I will explain to you.’

  Warily, I followed him upstairs to his little library, still brandishing the hoe in front of me. Iron. Good for binding demons.

  My father had known what I was. He had seen it in me, even when I was a tiny girl, Maestro Ficino said. I knew nothing as he had sought to protect me, but he had written of it, and his letters had been copied to Ficino himself. He would have had me read them, had there been time, but they were lost now, trampled under some Gascon mercenary’s foot. My master said he had been searching for me ever since the drawing of the Toledo angel had been seen in Italy.

  ‘The Almandal,’ I said, ‘I heard him speak of it. The man who came to buy me.’

  ‘Your father had very little time,’ Maestro Ficino replied, ‘but he knew what he was doing. The Almandal is ascribed to—’

  ‘—Solomon,’ I said wearily. I was tired of it, so tired of his mysteriousness, his belief in things which changed nothing. What stupid conjuring trick could bring Cecco back?

  ‘Well done. For the invocation of angels, their names written with a silver stylus on a wax tablet. They manifest as children, in red garments, their hands blood red, crowned with roses.’

  ‘So you know it was not real. Cecco thought—’

  ‘Poor Cecco. He was too young, he was not so learned as he liked to think, poor, poor lad. He told you I wanted to summon angels?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I sent for you, you and the books. But I was away at Pisa when you came and since you would not speak they could not make out who you were, they thought you were bought as a house slave.’

  ‘And slaves are invisible.’

  ‘It is true, I should have taken more care to seek you out. But then I was so busy with my studies. It was not until Cecco saw you and recognised you as the wise woman’s assistant—’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘But of course. Still, I needed to be sure. I had you speak with me, and it seemed to be so. Your father taught you much better than you think, Mora. I was ready, but then—’

  ‘—the French.’

  ‘Yes, and I thought my work would be destroyed.’

  ‘Margherita. Her name was Margherita. She was good to me. But what she did, it was just cunning, cunning and a little knowledge of herbs, nothing more. She had no learning. Piero locked her up, you know. She didn’t deserve that, either.’

  ‘Indeed. But she saw in you what your father had seen.’

  He was speaking in riddles, round and round we went.

  ‘Seen what, Maestro? Please be plain, seen what?’

  ‘It is delicate.’

  I looked at the hoe, my foolish weapo
n, and wondered if I would have to use it after all.

  ‘You might be a source, Mora. A key.’

  I was losing my composure again.

  ‘Maestro, if you do not speak plain I swear I shall beat you until your old bones rattle. Sir.’

  Samuel Benito, Toledo bookseller, had advertised around Europe that his daughter was a freak, a changeling true, a monster. A between-thing, neither male nor female; hard and smooth where I should be soft and hollow; maleficent; cursed indeed. And when they came for him, the soldiers of the Inquisition, he calculated quickly that his conjuring trick would scare them off. But dressing me as he did also conveyed another meaning – one that he hoped would allow me to be found. That, and my dowry of books, would explain who I was and make me precious indeed to the scholar who was lucky enough to get me.

  That scribbled pamphlet I had seen in Florence, which I thought was sensation, a crude thrill for ignorant people, was full of signs for those like Maestro Ficino who knew how to read it. The flowers in my hair? The eiresione, the hermaphrodite’s crown of flowers. The cochineal on my palms? The blood which one spilled in fallow fields when girls gave up their maidenheads on Midsummer’s Eve, a sacrifice to make the soil fruitful, in the old way. The pose he had me take, staggering there in the window place, arms outstretched? The alembic, the contrary cup of the alchemists, the source of the Philosopher’s Stone. Such an elegant key, my clever father had prepared, so learned, so witty. So Maestro Ficino had seen the drawing and read the letters, sent out the merchants stocked with Medici money to bring back his prize and I wished to every God I had ever heard named that I had stopped my mouth and stayed hidden in the kitchens.

  I dropped the hoe so it clattered on the floor. My master watched me, and in his avid eyes I saw that he believed it. And I thought it might be true.

  I thought of the crowd in the Zocodover, the startled maid. Maligno.

  I thought of the hammam at Adara’s house, of her hands passing over me, caressing, appraising. Of the fat old woman, who thought she might turn a fine profit from my strangeness. Mind and be nice to the gentleman.

  I thought of my three enemies in the palazzo, how they had snatched off my chemise to stare and sneer.

  I thought of my reflection in Donna Alfonsina’s mirror.

  I thought of Margherita. Won’t have the boys after you, will you? And Cecco’s sweet little brothers. Are you a witch?

  And then I made myself think of what I touched when I washed or squatted over the pot. A nubble of skin like a bean in the place between my legs. Underneath, all smoothness. People fear what they do not understand. I had thought myself cursed, and I had thought right.

  I wrapped my arms around my shoulders to stop the shaking, feeling the delicate bones beneath my linen, like folded wings. I could not cry. The troupe had been right, too. I belonged with them, a curiosity like Addio, a deformed thing like poor stumping Casinus.

  ‘They should have killed me. They should have drowned me at birth like a kitten,’ I spat.

  ‘They would have done once, in Greece,’ said my master placidly.

  ‘The dreams I have?’

  ‘A sign, a sign of what you might become.’

  ‘Shall I grow a beard then, and you can show me at the fair for a florin?’

  ‘Do not speak so lightly. It is a precious thing, a great thing. Come, sit. I will try to tell you.’

  I could not listen. I jumped up and ran from the library, out across the grounds and into the woods. I ran until my breath scraped my lungs and my legs shook, stumbling and falling, heedless of the thorns and the goring branches that awaited my eyes. I listened for that fluid sliding rhythm of the ground beneath me, to run until I was lost in it and beyond pain. But I staggered clumsily, ripping at a torn trunk as it came up to meet me, slicing a deep cut in my palm. I paused and licked at it and rubbed my blood over my face. Then I sank down against a trunk and howled until my crying seemed a thing apart from me, a thing of the darkness of the forest, throbbing through ferny hollows and treetops. Gasping and whining until I came back to myself, panting and sore, I knuckled my eyes and they filled with dirt.

  I would never marry, even if I could find a man willing to bed something as ugly as me. I would never have my monthly courses. I would never have a husband of my own, nor feel the plump, satisfying weight of a babe in my lap. If Cecco had known what his lips touched, he would have retched. I was a foul, unclean thing. I thought of my little cabinet of herbs, and how I believed I might make cures and be useful, and live quietly. I felt empty, scraped out inside with the loss of something I had never yet known. I saw now why my father had tried to teach me of the northmen, and their magic. Had he not told me that the seid was the gift of between-ones, those who slipped like shadows between the spaces of the world? Mooncalf, Margherita had called me, mermaid. Both things and not-thing. Nothing.

  *

  I went back, of course. I went back because I had nowhere else to go and winter was coming on and it was Careggi or starve in the forest. No one would ever want me now except Maestro Ficino, who had not even noticed my absence. I sliced off my hair with a kitchen knife, and stitched myself a clumsy shirt from a sheet. So, when Giovanni de Medici came, he found the old scholar and his boy slave, his apprentice. Just as Cecco had been. Ser Giovanni brought house servants and grooms and horses, and looked to set himself up as master at Careggi, since there was none other to challenge him.

  Piero de Medici was fled from Florence, an outlaw with a ransom of four thousand ducats on his head. Savonarola, the monk of San Marco, claimed the French king as the instrument of God’s justice, come across the mountains, just as he had predicted; to crush vice and exalt virtue, make straight all that was crooked, renew the old and reform all that was deformed. Charles installed himself in Piero’s emptied palace and demanded one hundred and fifty thousand ducats as the price of the city’s safety. If the Florentines did not pay, he proclaimed, he would sound his trumpets and put the city to the sword. The Florentines, who always cared more for gold than for honour, refused him. If he would sound his trumpets, they declared, they would ring their bells – and their defiance was successful, for the king turned his army on to Rome. With their money secured, they were willing to let Savonarola have a care for their virtue, and make him a greater tyrant than ever Piero had dreamed of being.

  I feared that some of the mouths who travelled with Ser Giovanni might recognise me from the palazzo, but all had been so turned about since Piero’s fall that none of them even thought on me. The talk was all of Savonarola, who had decreed that Florence must fast for its sins, and of those children of his I had seen parading through the streets. The ‘Blessed Bands’ they were called. They were hollow-eyed now with hunger, gathering books and pictures and all that had made Florence gracious and learned. The Dominicans rewarded them for spying on their own parents, reporting a game at cards for a few coins here, a treasured length of lace locked up in a marriage chest there. They carried olive branches and red painted crucifixes around the Signoria and, much to Maestro Ficino’s disgust, it was said that angels had come among the people, to redeem them and bring them back to God.

  ‘He called upon the people to put to death anyone who called for the restoration of my family,’ Ser Giovanni explained. ‘The palle are gone from every house in the city. Even my own.’ He had the decency to look ashamed. ‘We are called Popolano, now.’

  ‘There are those who try to stand against him,’ he went on. ‘They throw stones at the bands and make a racket when he goes out to preach, but he is loved by many. They say that he will make Florence a new Jerusalem.’

  There was a Venetian merchant who had offered a fortune for certain pictures; they made an effigy of him and set it atop a tower of scent bottles and gowns, fans, jewellery, looking glasses, velvet bed canopies and silk stockings, and fired it all. They burned words too, poems and plays and philosophy, anything that might distract the people from their duty to God or let them dream a while on something r
are and beautiful.

  ‘They seek magic books, Maestro. Books are silent heretics, they say.’

  My master put his head in his hands and groaned. I thought of Cecco, of how proud he had been that ignorance and superstition would never govern in Florence. At least he had not lived to see his beliefs in flames.

  ‘And what shall you do, sir?’ asked my master carefully.

  ‘The city grows hungry. They will need grain, and they will pay for it. I shall stay here and keep quiet and see about it, when the time comes. I am writing to the Countess of Forli, who has lands in the Romagna, great estates of wheat. I think she will be willing to sell.’

  A silence fell. There was a fire burning in the library now, and wine and fruit on the table.

  ‘And I, sir? As you see, it is more urgent than ever now that I continue with my researches.’

  ‘You are welcome to stay as long as you wish, Maestro. I know of the high regard in which my uncle the great Lorenzo held you. I should be honoured if you would remain here at Careggi.’

  So after all that had happened, it seemed that very little had changed. I spent each day with my master, shut up with the books, while the Duke of Milan turned his coat again and leagued with the Pope and the Venetians to drive the French out of Italy. Thus I heard the name Borgia for the first time. Borgia, the Spanish Pope. They said he had bought the papacy with a mule train of silver. They said he was debauched, a murderer. They said he knew the old arts, the black arts, that each night four or five men, bishops and prelates and others too, were found washed up in the river of Rome, and that no one dared speak for fear of poison. For all that he was a Catalan, the Pope claimed that he loved Italy, and would surrender his tiara rather than bow to the French king. Charles’s army persuaded him otherwise, and that winter the gates of Rome were opened to them.

  So skilful was this Pope, so subtle and beguiling, that Charles rode on to Naples believing that he would receive its crown from the Pope’s own hands. Yet while he played the gallant with a whole chapbook of beautiful whores, and his men bit the very fingers from the women of the city just to have their rings, the Pope was scheming against him. By the summer Charles was chased out of Italy like a journeying dog, biting first one and then another, all his looted treasures left behind and his great army laid about with the pox.