by Lisa Hilton
Then I realized that I was dead, after all. I didn’t mind it. I thought I would go back to sleep, and closed my eyes, laughing. I was glad to be dead. In fact, I was so happy that my last thought wondered if the dead could run mad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘HOW DID YOU FIND ME?’
We were propped on the stoop of the wagon, cosy in a blanket and the first lemony sunbeams of the Roman spring. I was still too weak to walk more than a few steps, when I tried the pain still sliced at me, but the taint of the poppy had bled out and I knew I should get well. I could not stop looking at him, it was all I could do to stop myself reaching out to touch his face, over and over. He had not been killed. I had seen what I wanted to see, what something in me thought I deserved to see. But he had been badly injured, so badly he had lain ill a whole year. There was a hollow in his skull that fitted my thumb. That at least I could ask to touch, nestled under the thick cap of his hair.
‘I tried to find you, as soon as I was well. I thought you would write to me.’
I remembered the letter of condolence Maestro Ficino had asked me to finish, which I could not bear to touch. I had moved my room at Careggi when the roof began to leak, it was perhaps still there, a soaked lump that could have saved me so much suffering, though I could not care about it now. It had taken a long time for Cecco to learn that Maestro Ficino was at Careggi, his father was afraid that Medici servants would be victimised and had taken his family to relatives at Pistoia.
‘And then, for a while, I thought you were dead.’
His father had returned to the palazzo to look for me, that first awful day. Some of the Medici slaves had been killed, one of them a fair haired girl. I thought on my trio of enemies, and was sad for whichever of them had not deserved to die that way. Then Cecco heard that Ser Giovanni was returned, and was dealing grain for the Medici under the name of Popolano. He had heard the rumours of witchcraft at the villa and knew it could only mean that I lived. Eventually he walked all the way to Careggi, sleeping in hedges.
‘For a while, my poor father had nothing. I hated to burden him.’
When he arrived, he found me gone to Forli, and wrote to me there, but by then the plague had come, and no correspondence was permitted into the town.
‘I tried again, I wrote, but the French were on the move, it was chaos. Nowhere seemed safe, the roads were jammed with people leaving. Ser Giovanni was dead . . .’
‘He was a good man, you know,’ I said. ‘Good enough. What happened in Florence was not his fault.’
And then he heard of the siege of Ravaldino, and feared again for my life. He had stayed at Careggi, doing his best to take care of our old master, who was frail and forgetful now. Maestro Ficino told him of the troupe, of our own extraordinary escape from Florence, and when Cecco decided to follow me down to Forli after it fell, to try for news, he had come upon them on the road and recognised them.
‘So you were there? That night on the road, with the wolf?’
‘I hadn’t mentioned you then. I wasn’t sure I could trust them, there were so many rumours of poisoning, and unholy goings on. Then they found you on the road and I tried to get close, I was desperate, but there were guards around you all the time. I came on after you to Rome, I thought I could find you, we asked about you and the Countess all over the city.’
I didn’t want to speak about Caterina. There would be time for that, one day. I wanted this happiness to last a little longer.
‘So why did you follow me?’ I was not flirting. I was fearful of his answer.
He looked at me. He was a man now, not a boy, and I had been right. He had grown up handsome. His hair was bronze, not carroty, his shoulders had widened, his skin was clear and tanned from the months of travel. It darkened, blood flushing up into his cheeks.
‘Maybe I like trouble.’
We both looked at the ground. My throat felt as though I had swallowed a melon.
‘Here, I brought you something – I’ve had them all this time. My father found them.’
He bounded away and returned with a rolled flour sack. He tipped out my old doll and a bundle of red cloth into my lap. I unfolded my dress and turned it in my hands, looking for the place where my heart had lain.
‘I brought them,’ he said again. ‘You seemed keen on them.’
‘See this, Cecco?’ I asked softly. ‘This is my name.’
They were the only things I had ever truly owned, I thought. A broken doll and a child’s worn dress. Those, and a ready fortune in emeralds.
*
The twins went into the city as I asked and found a goldsmith who did not ask questions. They brought me back a leather pouch of stones, and the clasp with the Sforza wyvern on a plain cord, which now I wore about my neck. I wanted to give them as many as they would take – there was money there to buy them a palace apiece if they cared for it, but they settled on just three. One for now for new clothes and shoes for the horses and a better wagon and provisions, one to keep if times went hard and one for the child, that when it was grown it might be whatever it wanted in this world that money could buy. Johannes the blind musician was the father of Annunziata’s babe. He had been made in my master’s sign, Aquarius, in the coldest month of the year, when I had thought myself a prisoner in Valentino’s rooms at Forli. At first it seemed sad to me that Johannes should never look upon her lovely face, or gaze into the new eyes of his child, then I thought on how lucky Annunziata was to have someone who loved her for what she was, for whom her beauty would never fade, for whom the sound of her voice and the touch of her hands were sufficient.
I lay another month with the bleeding, mostly in the darkness of the wagon. Cecco had shown himself surprisingly handy for one who claimed to have been bred for a scholar, and he had made himself useful fixing the axles on the wagons, mending and painting the props, but he did his work where I could see him through the curtain. I never wanted to stop seeing him. Annunziata and Immaculata brought me broth, and food when I could take it, and a length of red tabby silk for a dress that they would sew for me. They brought me something else, too. I asked after my old friend. Still with them, they said, though his eyes were glaucous now and he was tired-out by the coming heat. I asked them to help me out of the wagon one evening. I climbed gingerly to the ground, which shifted a little beneath me, but holding their shoulders I could stand firm for the first time. Addio was there, gleeful, and Casinus, with new wheels to his trolley and a silver-topped stick with a lion carved into its head to steer him along.
I had dreamed so long of wolves. They had been with me ever since I was taken from Toledo, their wildness had kept me company and comforted me, and it had been in me, somewhere. Mind and be nice to the gentleman. I saw it all, now.
My mother had the sight. She had left that to me, along with her protection stitched against my heart, her gift, her gift to me. My father, concerned for my odd looks, my smallness and slightness and, perhaps, a little fetched away by his own desire to commune with the old knowledge that scholars sought, had seen what was not there. I was no half-creature, no alchemist’s chalice. I was made a little differently, that was all. His desire to protect me and his own faith had done the rest – convinced Ficino, convinced the bookseller, convinced me. For how else could I make sense of my strangeness? Adara and that old Toledo bawd had believed it, and tried to turn a profit on me. What that old man had done had turned something in me, but in my rage and confusion I had summoned not wolves, not the magic of the seid, but another self, one which could not be bound and used but which ran free, a spirit-self, which succoured me through all I had endured. I was grateful to it, in a way. Without it, I might have ended like those poor girls at the palazzo, or those in Forli, splayed out for the pleasure of a hired soldier and left to die. Or else my knowledge of herbs and cures would have condemned me and I might be counting out my last hours in a cell in the Castello, listening as they stacked the faggots outside. I had been strong enough to convince Valentino because I believed it myself. But th
en he wanted to believe, because he thought he knew all about me.
Through those long days in the wagon, as I healed, I sorted my thoughts once again, telling them out. I was weaving a new pattern, separating the threads of my old life to make a new one, which had not yet come clear. Cecco was not dead, I had to learn again who I was. I had loved Caterina, and the pain of her betrayal had brought out the wolf in me, but I had been loyal to her, in the end. There was no curse on me, I could not blame myself for her, or for my papa. The evil that had come upon them was none of my doing.
Rome was full of stories of Caterina. Lioness they were calling her, the lioness of the Romagna. She was a heroine, they made poems and ballads on her. I asked the twins to fetch me a bundle of pamphlets. Listen to the unfortunate Caterina of Forli, Abandoned without help, Who alone has the courage to fight for Italy, Who will die with honour . . . She chose it, I knew, she chose how she wanted it to end. I could never have saved her. I peered at the smudged sheets in the dingy light of the wagon. There is the Rocca, with Caterina on the walls, there the French soldiers climbing the walls like huge-armed apes. And there are the wolves, running between them, their jaws black with cheap ink. One pamphlet speaks only of that, of how the Countess who tried to poison the Pope made league with the devil and called his minions to her aid. She kept a witch, it said, a Spanish witch, half-girl, half-boy. It was well printed, no doubt as to its source. And another, scrawled and hand-copied, claims that they came with the Borgia, that he summoned his fellows from Hell to do his bidding. They had come because they hungered, because they scented death and could not resist its call. I was no witch, to whistle up a storm of wolves.
Which left me with Valentino, with my dreams of the man in black. For I could not deny how I had seen him, how he had called to me. Here the thread tangled, I could not unpick it. I had allowed him to use me, believing I was using him, and I had to acknowledge that there was a likeness between us. I was shamed by the pleasure I had taken in him, but he had played me fair, I thought, in the end. I would put that away then, lock it up deep inside me where it should never need show itself again. No one should ever know how he had spoiled me. In Florence, picking over the heaps of greens in the kitchens of the palazzo, I had known that I must wait, that I must wait until I could conjure the wolves out of me and become Mura again.
And now I would. I would be a girl like any other girl, in a new Mayday dress, a girl who did not think on charms or learning or the messengers of the planets. That was for scholars like Maestro Ficino, not for me. I would be Mura Benito, I would walk out on a spring morning to gather herbs to heal people, as her father had once done. I wanted no more of great people, their world of pride and power and soldiers and sieges would spin along as it had always done, without me. I could live quiet, as I had hoped to once at Careggi, before my dreams were done with me, and that would be enough.
Chellus and Gherardus led him round.
‘Be careful,’ they warned, ‘his teeth are going, but not his temper.’
I took one small, weak step forward, another. I sought him behind his poor filmed eyes, tried to find his heart beneath his draggled shedding pelt. Nothing. No wild flights through the dark wastes of the north, no tattooed giants hailing me from the frozen mists, no forests ripe with sacrifice, no affinity of the blood. I smiled. How foolish I had been. He lifted a hindleg and scratched at a flea. I put a questing hand to his coarse fur, rubbed along the skin for the squirming louse, crushed its blood-fattened carapace between my fingers. He growled low and snapped idly, irritably, so I had to snatch it back. He had never been my friend. For one tiny, plenteous moment, I was sorry.
‘It is gone, you see,’ I told them. ‘Quite gone. Thank you.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I WORE MY RED DRESS ON THE DAY THE WORLD changed. The finest tabby silk, cut close to fit me. Over my heart, inside, where no one should see, I pricked out a pentagram and stitched my name within it. Mura. I gave new dresses to the girls, blue for Immaculata, a soft green velvet to cosset Annunziata’s belly. We dressed ourselves in the wagon, I combed my hair out and put jasmine water behind my ears. At my throat I wore the Sforza wyvern on its cord, as a reminder. I would not forsake my lady. I had learned from her that courage may be taken from music and dancing and loveliness, as much as from swords and men – the things I wished to forget. I hoped the music of our feast would carry to her, deep in the heart of the Castello, and that for a moment she might forget herself, and be the woman I had known in those first years at the Paradiso, when she had Ser Giovanni, flushed with her power and her love.
I found that I could give orders like quite the fine lady. This May Eve, we would have two bonfires, and Annunziata and Johannes would jump over their embers in the old way, at dawn, and be married. I sent for juniper berry to clean the flames, and we scoured down by the riverbank for rowan boughs to hang from the wagons. I told the troupe to give word that all the pilgrims in the campground were welcome, as our guests, and Casinus handed out coins from our store for pork and wine and white bread. There would be sweetmeats, too, from the finest cook shop in Rome, marchpane and candied chestnuts and magdalenas in the Spanish style. There were new shirts for the men and I did not forget a paper of beefsteak for a bad tempered old wolf.
Johannes began playing as we made ourselves ready. It was an odd song, like nothing I had ever heard, sad and lingering, in a language Annunziata said shyly came from a country called Ireland, a green country far away over the sea, full of black haired men and green eyed girls. ‘Beautiful, Mura,’ she said. ‘Like you.’
She handed me a looking glass. It was a cheap thing compared with what I had handled at Forli, and at first I did not want to look. I had never found comfort in a mirror, but they giggled and teased me and I laughed too, thinking this is what it is to be a woman, and have friends. So I looked, and there I was, my hair all blanched and frosty about my shoulders, as pale as May-blossom, my eyes their familiar startling green. I looked closer and saw Signor Moise’s face again, the expression in his eyes when I had tried on the necklace. Something had changed. I thought I might look pretty. More ordinary perhaps, no changeling with savage cheekbones and a wild shadow’s stare, no scrawny boy in a ragged shirt, but a girl one might look upon in the street, who was young and fresh and smooth skinned, whose face might lift a heart.
‘Look at her,’ laughed Immaculata, ‘batting her eyes like a coquette. They’ll all want to dance with you tonight, Mura!’
‘But there’s only one she wants to dance with,’ added Annunziata. And I laughed with them, like a real girl.
They were both right. Johannes was joined by a piper and a harpist and a boy with a yellow painted drum as tall as Addio, then more and more musicians from all over the campground, until he had to borrow Casinus’s stick and beat it to keep them in time. The torches were lit, and the two huge bonfires, with one of the old wagons at their heart, for the troupe should have a finer one now, kept off the chill of the spring night. I drank soft red Spanish wine, and I danced, shyly at first, with Chellus and Gherardus, showing me the steps. And then, laughing, I danced with Addio who hopped about earnestly, his funny big hands warm and tight around my own. And then with men who asked me, over and over, a lumbering butcher’s apprentice with apple blossom behind his ears, a whipcord Sicilian with a dagger in his high boot and gold in his teeth, a fair haired boy from Bergamo whose accent made everyone laugh. More and more of them, until I forgot their faces, dazzled by the whirl of it and their smiles in the firelight. My shoes seemed to be tapping out my name, I told it again and again, Mura, my name is Mura. I danced until I fell down panting and then I got up and danced again. I danced with Cecco. He asked me properly, with a bow like a fine gentleman, as though we were guests back in the palazzo. I danced in his arms until the first grey light showed over the city. In a while, he whispered something to me, and I whispered something back.
We did not want to spoil their happiness with a leave-taking. I went to the wagon f
or my cloak and my bag of stones, which were all I owned in the world, and I was about to slip away when I felt a tug at the hem of my red dress.
‘You’re not going, Mura?’
‘I have to leave, Addio. This is not my place.’
His knobby face was twisted with concern under the most fantastical cap I had seen him wear, all patches that glowed like jewels, with red ribbons and a brass bell on the tip.
‘It doesn’t matter, you know, that you can’t do it any more. You’re welcome to stay with us. There’s the babe that will need caring for, in time, and you’re a good dancer, you might learn the tumbling if you tried.’
‘Thank you, Addio. But I’m not leaving alone.’
‘Are you ready, Mura?’
Cecco had his things. We thought to hire horses at the city gates. Addio clapped his hands and danced a little caper.
‘Oh, I see, I see! The knight errant and his fine lady!’ He swept us a bow, then his face grew concerned.
‘You know where you go then? You will go back to Toledo?’
‘No. We go to Florence.’
We. I had never thought I would say that.
‘Give us a kiss then.’
So I did, and that was three kisses, one from a dwarf, one from a dead boy, and one from a future I had never dared to dream on. Cecco took my hand.
‘Are you ready, my love?’
I was still for a moment, breathing in the newness of it.
‘Mura, come on.’ Mura.
I dreamed a she-wolf who came to my bedside in Florence. I dreamed them singing to me along the road to Forli, along the road to Rome. Beyond the mountains, beyond their singing, a man waits at a window. Behind him a city is burning. His sleeve caresses the white stone where he rests his gloved hand, black and red, with a massive jewel that glows deeper than the flames. His face is masked, a smooth coating of velvet. He turns his face to the hills, listening. In a while, it comes, one long howl. Somewhere, out there in the forest, the wolves are running. Little witch. He touches the ruby to his lips. She comes, she comes.
