The Thief Of Peace

by Jess Whitecroft

  The laugh burst out of him in a shriek, just as he emerged into the afternoon sunlight. He covered his mouth with his hand and kept running, needing to put distance between him and the chapel. In the shadow of the cloisters his knees gave out, and he slid down to the base of a pillar, where he sat, laughing and laughing until his stomach ached, as though mirth itself was another form of Gluttony. And maybe it was, because it was indecent to laugh this hard at nothing in particular. It had spurted from him in much the same way as the venal impulses that came upon him at night – unwanted and sinful, but too natural to be denied any longer.

  *

  In Florence there were always quei garzoni, that crop of somewhat disreputable pretty boys who slipped in and out of artists’ studios, and – more often than not – their beds. Giancarlo had always stood out from the crowd due to being prettier than most, but he would have preferred to distinguish himself in other ways. He wanted the opportunity to paint.

  He sauntered through the market on his way back to the house of Albani. It was a bright and beautiful day, one of those days where everything on sale looked irresistible and money seemed to burn a hole in his pocket. He passed carts full of ripe apples, stalls full of sausages, stacked wheels of hard, sharp pecorino cheese. Somewhere someone was cooking chicken, and the delicious smell of roasting fowl made his mouth water. He was just about to turn in the direction of the scent when he was aware of someone walking behind him, very close. Too close.

  Giancarlo turned to see Fillipo – the younger Ribisi brother – at his shoulder. He barely had time to gasp. Fillipo grabbed him by his sleeve and yanked him so hard that Giancarlo heard the seam tear. He stumbled and squirmed, but in their clumsy dance Fillipo somehow gained the upper hand and pulled him into a narrow alley between buildings.

  His back hit the wall. Fillipo had him by the throat, and he couldn’t reach his little sword.

  “Please…” he managed to say, and Fillipo released him, just enough to let him catch his breath.

  “What’s going on?” said Fillipo.

  “I don’t…I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  Fillipo gave him another shove, thrusting the space between his finger and thumb hard against Giancarlo’s throat. “You know,” he said. “The Albani place. It’s been shut up since Giacamo Albani died. Why is it open now?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  The hand thrust into his throat again, stealing his breath.

  “It’s my business if I say it’s my business,” said Fillipo.

  “Let me go.”

  “Or what? What are you going to do about it?” Fillipo leaned close, his pale grey eyes glittering with malice. “Scream? I’ll say you lured me into this alley with the promise of unnatural acts.” He pushed again with his hand. “Everyone knows you’re that artist’s bum boy. They’ll hang you for sins against God and nature.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Knowledge,” said Fillipo. “I want to know everything that goes on in the house of Albani. And that goes for Prato, too.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You do. The old man is up to something. Keep your eyes and ears open, and I’ll make it worth your while. If you don’t…well…”

  Fillipo released Giancarlo and shoved him, gasping, back onto the sunlit street. Giancarlo fled. His knees were as weak as water but somehow he kept running until he reached the house.

  He rushed in without thinking what he was going to say to Nicci should he find him there, and was unprepared for what he found.

  Nicci was in the dining room. He had pushed the great table against one wall and stacked the chairs on top of it. On the floor was a vast sheet of paper, charcoals scattered here and there.

  “What are you doing?” Giancarlo said.

  Nicci glanced up from his drawing. “What does it look like?”

  “Is it a commission?”

  Nicci got to his feet. His dark eyes were bright. “It could be,” he said, and – cupping Giancarlo’s face in his hands – kissed him. “Get undressed.”

  “Do you want me?” Do you love me? Please don’t say you love me. Not now.

  Nicci laughed. He looked flushed, animated. Alive. “Maybe later,” he said. “But right now, I need an angel.”

  *

  Slowly, back aching, Nicci rose from his knees. Laid out on the floor before him was what he felt certain in his bones and heart and guts to be a masterpiece. His masterpiece.

  It had been three days. It had come upon him like summer lightning, fired by Teo’s words. Faith, surrender, purity of heart.

  By rights Teo should have been his angel, but the young monk was no more likely to strip naked for an artist than he was going to sprout actual wings. Giancarlo had been the model, but the finished cartoon was full of Teo. The Virgin had his eyes, clear and candid and bright with faith. She had the curves of his lips and the way they slightly parted in wonderment. And she had his heart, his innocence, his clean, shining soul.

  She knelt dazzled next to her loom, head slightly bowed, but peeping up to gaze at the celestial thing that had somehow invaded her ordinary life. Her hands were held upturned in prayer, and he was so proud of her hands. They weren’t the hands of a plaster saint, but the hands of a girl who had spent her whole short life knowing nothing of her great destiny but had assumed that her life – like the lives of her mother and grandmother before her – would be passed in work, in the milking of goats and the making of cloth. He had already picked out the colours he would use to show the work-worn places.

  And then there was the angel, hanging in the air above her, wings so full and feathery that as he drew them Nicci imagined he could hear them open, hot and powerful as they beat against the air, like the wings of a swan taking off from water. Teo was in the angel, too, in its light and essence, and in the beautiful bare feet that didn’t quite touch the ground. It was a thousand times better than that sad Annunciation upstairs in the bedroom, and all Nicci needed now was a wall on which to paint his design.

  He carefully rolled up his work and rode to Prato in a daze, unable to remember the last time he’d felt this way. He was full now, stuffed and sated with the joy of work, but he could already feel the edge of a new hunger waiting to consume him. A hunger for plaster and paint, to get the thing up on a wall, pricked out and filled in, and the hard work of making it conform to the gorgeous vision in his head. Perhaps one day, if he ever agreed to leave the monastery, even for an afternoon, Teo could come and see what beauty he had inspired.

  Vicini opened the door. He glanced at the roll of paper under Nicci’s arm, but Nicci wasn’t here to speak to the servant. He swept past Vicini into the salon where Albani waited, impatient.

  “Signor Albani, I have a proposition for you.”

  Albani rose from his chair, frowning. “Where is my son?”

  “He’s still at the monastery,” said Nicci, untying the strings around the drawing.

  “Why?”

  “Well, your son is exceptionally stubborn,” said Nicci, speaking too fast in his haste to get it over with and get on with what he wanted to say. “Listen, I have something to show you. Will you hear me out?”

  “Hear you out? What is this, Volpaia?”

  Nicci moved a chair out of the way and unrolled his design. A silence settled on the room and his heart seemed to beat very loud at the top of his chest. Albani was still frowning. Vicini concealed a smirk.

  “Let me paint for you,” said Nicci, and the plea came from the very centre of him. “Give me a wall in one of your houses. An altarpiece for a church in your name. This is what I can do for you.”

  Albani didn’t look twice at the drawing. “I don’t pay you for this,” he said.

  “No, but—”

  “—but nothing, Volpaia. I pay you to persuade my son to leave the damn monastery. It’s been over a month and he’s still there.”

  “Please. I’m an artist. I have to work. Isn’t it good? See the feathe
rs? The hands of the Virgin?”

  Albani waved him away. “I have artists who work for me. I don’t need another.”

  “Please, Signor. Please. Let me work for you.”

  “You do work for me. But you seem to forget the job I’ve asked you to do.”

  “I am better than my reputation,” Nicci said. “Give me a chance to prove it to you. Look at my work. Isn’t this far better than that pale Annunciation you have in your house now? Do you even know the name of the artist who painted it?”

  “No,” said Albani. “But nobody knows yours either.”

  There was a faint commotion at the door behind him, but Nicci was only dimly aware of it. “This is cruelty,” he said. “I have to work. I have to do something with my life.”

  “Then bring me my son. Maybe then we can discuss…patronage.”

  “You would use your only living child as a bargaining chip? Really?”

  “How I use my child is no business of yours, Volpaia. Now roll up that scribble and do the damn job you were paid to do.”

  “Scribble?” Nicci was about to say something of the kind of thing that had burned his bridges in the past, about how Albani may as well have had two glass eyes for all he appreciated his work, or how he now understood how sick Teo had become of his father’s puppetry.

  And he would have, had he not been interrupted.

  “Albani!”

  It was a woman who spoke. She had found her way into the house somehow, like a blackbird that flies in through a window and causes havoc inside. Her black skirts rustled as she strode through the house. She wore widow’s weeds, but the black didn’t stop at her clothes. Her hair was raven, her large eyes dark. The way he held herself – neck upright, shoulders proud – reminded Nicci that he’d seen her before, crossing a piazza while observers whispered about the scandals that attended her name. Fiorina del Campo.

  “Madonna, you have some nerve presenting your face around here,” said Albani.

  “You leave me no choice,” she said. “As long as I am without legal redress I will be here.”

  Albani gave a humourless laugh. “And what legal redress do you imagine yourself entitled to?”

  “The truth,” she said. “My husband was innocent. His property should not be forfeit—”

  “—your husband murdered my son—”

  “—he did nothing of the sort—”

  “—enough!” Albani was looming over her by now. She was a tall woman, but the old man was still an imposing figure. And bullying people seemed to give a new stiffness to his spine. She didn’t blink, though. She held his gaze, her chin pushed out and her whole body trembling subtly with anger.

  “When you have seen what I have seen,” said Albani, his voice low and hard and cold. “Your son. Your child. When you have seen him laid out on a slab like bad meat in a butcher’s shop, grey and bloated from the water where he drowned with a knife in his back…when you have seen such a thing and survived, madonna, then you may come to me screeching like a shrew about redress. And not before.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t seem to be listening to what I’m saying,” she said, speaking slowly, as if to an idiot or a dog. “My husband did not do this. Your son’s killer walks free in Florence today. Are you content with that, Signor Albani?”

  “A man hung for my son’s death. I am content with that, madonna.”

  She shook her head again. “And do you think Giacamo would be content with that?”

  “Take my son’s name out of your mouth, whore.”

  To Nicci’s surprise, she laughed. “Did you even know him?”

  “Better than you.”

  “You know what he complained about to me, more than anything else?” she said. She had the devil in her eyes now, and Nicci was afraid for her. He heard footsteps at the door, footsteps – no doubt – of people paid to remove her.

  “You,” she continued. “He complained about you.”

  “Get out.”

  “Sometimes it felt as though you were in the bed with us, because you ruled every aspect of his life.”

  The guards moved close now, flanking her. “Take this harlot out of my house,” Albani told them. “And never allow her to return.”

  The guards reached for her, but she shook them off. “Don’t you touch me,” she said. “This harlot is leaving. You ruled his life and now you rule his death, because it’s too much trouble for you to even try and discover the truth.” She turned to leave. “The Ribisi are right. The only balls in this fucking family belong to the Medici.” She looked directly at Nicci as she walked away. Her eyes, with their long black lashes, were fierce and beautiful. “Good luck working for this lot.”

  Albani watched her leave. He stood very still, his big fists clenched, the veins on his neck standing out. “Leave,” he said, in a voice like the rumble of a volcano about to erupt.

  Vicini took hold of Nicci’s elbow and steered him to the door. For once, Nicci allowed himself to be manhandled. Behind him he heard something precious shatter.

  “Do your job, Volpaia,” said Vicini, once they were out of range of the storm. His thin lips were pale with fear. “Nothing more.”

  6

  Brother Sandro was dying.

  He didn’t come to Vespers or Compline, and by Matins the brothers were glancing at the space where his chair should be and exchanging furtive, worried looks.

  And so it was that Teo took his turn at Brother Sandro’s bedside, excused prayers so that the old man wouldn’t die alone. He had sunk slowly, and now lay sinking deeper still, his closed eyes deep in their sockets, his hollow cheeked mouth open to reveal the stumps of his few remaining teeth.

  Teo sat uneasy in the presence of death. No matter how much he told himself that Brother Sandro was going to a better place – and as a living miracle he would surely have to go there – Teo still had a young man’s fear of dying. He had come too close before and remembered too clearly the darkness that had closed around him when his breath stopped. There had been no angels, no light, no promise of eternity, just a panicked darkness that grew thicker and heavier and threatened to claim him completely. He had kicked and fought and struggled against the fogged, grey certainty that if he didn’t fight he would simply stop.

  And worse, there might be no eternal reward.

  He tried to pray, but his mind was alive, squirming, kicking against the darkness. It carried him back to a sunny day when he’d been traipsing through the monastery grounds with Nicci. The verdant wheat fields were beginning to turn that dull, heavy bronze-green that came before they turned gold. Fat, white bottomed bees bumbled through the clover, like merry, careless drunks stumbling from one alehouse to the next. Teo remembered the wide-eyed marguerites, the butter coloured sunshine and the presence of a friend with whom he could share all this beauty. And in that moment, he had been completely happy.

  “I never want to regret the things I didn’t do,” Nicci had said. “Imagine staring death in the face and thinking of all the sins you hadn’t committed. All of the ones you so dearly wanted to commit.”

  Teo had chided him, but had done so with fond familiarity. These back and forths – Nicci trying to be outrageous, Teo telling him off – had become as much a part of their conversations as their meditations on the inner lives of pigs, or Nicci’s frequent grumbles about the patronage system.

  Teo looked over at the old man stretched beside him. “Do you regret the things you didn’t do?” he said, very quietly, knowing it was unlikely that Brother Sandro could hear him. Brother Sandro hadn’t spoken for several days and had taken no water since sunrise. His breaths were slow now, deep and snoring. The blood had stopped flowing from his wounds and they lay open, undressed and darkly fascinating. The edges of the holes looked burned, as though the invisible nails had been driven through his flesh by some instrument of holy fire.

  He wondered if it was all worth it, and could barely believe the answer he came up with. He, who had longed to be touched by the stigmata, lo
oked into the wounds in the old man’s hands and thought maybe it wasn’t worth it. What if Brother Sandro was lying there dreaming of the wife he might have loved, and the babies she might have borne him? Was he, in the last moments of his life, regretting the things he’d missed? Good wine, rich food, fancy clothes, all the things of the world that Nicci – by his appreciation of them – tracked into the monastery like wet footprints after rain.

  “I’ll repent on my deathbed,” Nicci had said. “Isn’t that how it works?”

  In the dark Teo remembered the sunlight once more. His smile, and how he’d laughed. Although he knew he was supposed to love sinners like Nicci, the sudden rush of love that Teo felt for him burned as bright as Lucifer.

  He reached for his beads again, desperate for a prayer that would banish all these thoughts from his head, but then Brother Sandro made a dry, croaking noise deep in the back of his throat. Teo snapped to attention.

  By the dull glow of the rushlight Teo saw the slitted shine of the old man’s eyes as his eyelids trembled.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m here.” Compline was nearly over. “Father will be here soon.”

  Brother Sandro moaned and tried to lift his hand. His arthritic fingers tried to stretch out towards a corner of the room and Teo saw that he was looking in the same direction. It was hard to tell because the knuckles were so swollen and the movement so limited, but Teo thought that the old man’s index finger was extended further than the rest.

  “What is it?” said Teo, following his gaze to the corner of the room. There was nothing, just shadow and cracks in the plaster, but Teo had a feeling that Brother Sandro was looking beyond that. “What do you see, Brother? Do you see the light? The angels? Is it beautiful?”

  The old man moaned again, but this time Teo recognised the tone, the same dying animal urgency that came upon you when the dark closed in. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re not alone.”

  Brother Sandro’s hand sank back down onto the bed. He gave another deep snoring breath. Then another.