The Botticelli Secret

19

I was taken from the room by a pair of Moorish beauties who showed me to what appeared to be a bath house. They stripped my torn and salt-caked dress and I slithered into the milky water, which lay like smoky green glass below Roman columns and capitals of stone that looked as soft as sugar. One maiden tossed in jasmine blossoms and the other washed me gently with porous sea sponges, even in the most intimate places. Although I’ve never been into that sort of thing (though of course I would oblige with a little Sapphic posturing if a client paid for it), I must admit my body was in paradise for these moments. My mind, however, was tossing on a stormy sea, and I could almost have screamed to have been parted from Brother Guido at such a time, when a thousand questions crowded my mind. My body was at peace, but my brain was in turmoil. Who, or what, were “the Seven”? Or rather, if Don Ferrente and Niccolò della Torre were two of them, who were the other five? What did the thumb rings mean? What was the newly dead Lord Silvio’s connection with Don Ferrente? What “great occasion” were we invited to? And what the merry hell did the Primavera have to do with it all? I tried to still my racing thoughts, for I knew that Brother Guido would be getting similar ablutions from his menservants, so I would have to wait patiently for an audience. I only hoped the monk had managed to conceal the painting from his servants.

At length I was clothed in a loose shift and taken to my room, an airy chamber with a door that I knew adjoined my “master’s.” The slaves fussed around me and I could not wait for them to be gone, although they brought fruit, rolled herrings, and cooled wine in a clay jar of crushed ice. They told me, in their odd Neapolitan dialect, combined with a great deal of dumb-show mime, that the tiring women would be here soon to dress me for dinner. Throughout this entire discourse, my ears strained for sounds of my friend next door, but I could only hear occasional moans and cries that confused me greatly. If I had been listening at the door of any other man on this flat earth of ours, then I would have thought there was a little self-abuse going on, but with Brother Guido I knew that there was no question that he was “taking himself in hand.” Alone at last, burning with curiosity, I listened at the door but the room was now silent. Almost sure that there was no one now within, I did not knock but entered at once.

He was there, alone, facedown on his ornate bed, his visage turned to the wall. His habit lay in a heap at the foot of the bed. The knotted belt, I noticed, was not there. The brown fustian had collapsed in a crumpled pool as if its occupant had shed his skin. And indeed he had. For Brother Guido’s back was slick with blood, striped again and again with the sting of a whip. I knew three things then.

Cosa Uno: Brother Guido had used the knotted belt of his Franciscan habit to scourge himself for his transgressions.

Cosa Due: without counting, I knew that there were exactly forty lashes on his back, the number that the vengeful Romans had laid on the back of Christ on his death day. My questions died on my lips and I withdrew, stricken. Brother Guido turned his head at once, caught, but when he saw it was me two crystal tears fell from his bright blue eyes, across his noble nose, to fall on the silk coverlet. Lacrimae Christi. I knew the third thing:

Cosa Tre: I had done this to him. I had tempted him like a siren of the sea, he had kissed me back with what he thought was his last breath, and he could not forget that he had done so. Stricken, I closed the door, not knowing what to say.