The Botticelli Secret

Milan, March 1483

38

My mother watched me lazily as we traveled, through eyes that were mere glittering crescents.

I felt the cartone in my bodice, the wooden roll in one sleeve, and the silver coin in the other every time I shifted position, and felt as if her gaze saw through my clothing. I determined not to sleep at all on the journey, fought hard to keep awake after the night I’d had, for I trusted my mother no more than she trusted me. I knew she suspected me, knew she thought there had been foul play in Bolzano—that I’d given Marta the slip. I knew she searched my chamber routinely, wondered that she hadn’t yet searched my person. I even had the bitch’s mask in the hood of my cloak. I met her eyes and dropped mine, wary lest she guess at my thoughts. My treacherous lids closed and sleep took me.

A tinkle of falling metal awoke me moments or hours later. Marta was gone from my side but my mother still regarded me lazily, a lioness watching her prey. But outside the carriage the world had changed again: I looked from the window to see enormous glassy lakes lying at the foot of emerald mountains. Still and serene, they invited the eye with their loveliness.

“The water is poisoned,” said my mother, following my gaze. It was the single thing she uttered to me on the journey. We had shifted once again, like the breath of the breeze ruffling the waters of the lake, disturbing and repainting the sky in its image. The wind had changed and the weathercock had turned. We were once again, for some unspoken reason, at war.

In another day we were passing through the massy city gates of Milan, a closed place, ringed with a rosary of walls and gates. I was once again in a ferment of impatience and excitement, and the moment the guards on the postern let us pass and closed their pikes behind us I began to look for Brother Guido in every doorway, to listen for his voice over the beat of hooves and the hollers of traders, to seek his features in the face of every noble and peasant we passed. I barely noticed long, wide roads with brand-new silver-stone buildings; nor the elegant Roman pillars of the colonnades that showed the new marched side by side with the old. Even the miraculous Duomo, with its forest of silver spires tipped with gold like a diadem, left me unmoved. It was not a place but a person that I sought.

At every moment I willed him to come to me, to snatch me from the carriage to press me to him and carry me away—even though I knew such things were not his monkish way. I tried to sit still and trust, but my heart sank as we approached a vast bloodred fortress with battlements like the wards of a thousand keys that would serve to keep me in and Brother Guido out. We passed through the great gates of a clock tower beneath the baleful eye of a coiled serpent carved in stone upon the castle arms. Poised to strike.

Inside, the stone walls were the brutal red of battle-gore, but the castle itself was beautiful; a fortress with a moated palace within. The round towers reached high into the orange sky, where strange shredded clouds the color of oxblood flew like pennants. Had Brother Guido penetrated these precincts, this barracks of a place? For a massive square of grass had become a parade ground—ranks upon ranks of soldiers were drilled through their paces. Hundreds of lean, tall young men all had cropped hair, curved swords, and cloaks of the same shade of ocher, a shade that was familiar to me but wouldn’t be pinned down by memory. The men reacted as one to the shouts of a man in armor mounted on a huge black brute of a horse. We descended from the carriage amid the maneuvers, my mother and I, but the soldiers were so well trained that not one of them spared two such visions a glance. The capitano, however, trotted over, and his steed pranced and reared like a statue, the huge black shadow near blocking the sun.

“Dogaressa!” he yelled, as if he still continued the drill. “This is delightful. And your daughter?” He jumped from the beast, and a single soldier broke rank to dangle from the stallion’s reins. The capitano threw his helmet onto the turf where it landed with a clank. A neat curtain of smooth black hair fell about his ears, cut like a pageboy’s, as if his man had placed a trencher on his head and sliced around it with the shears. Even more familiar now, he took off his iron gauntlets and offered us both a vast sweaty paw. The three words that he uttered—“Ludovico Maria Sforza”—were enough to make my mother drop to her knees. Thus I learned three things from this tiny encounter.

Cosa Uno: he was overlord of the whole place.

Cosa Due: my mother was much more in awe of this friendly, bluff soldier than she had been of that cold fish Sigismund.

Cosa Tre: he wore the golden ring of the palle on his left thumb. Such sights had long since ceased to shock me.

I waited for my instructions as my mother and the lord of Milan exchanged pleasantries. I thought I knew my own drill by now: lovely to meet you, here are your rooms, see you at the feast tonight.

But this time it was different. I was not taken to the residence across the moat, which clearly housed the court, but up the battlements to one of the towers. The room had no furniture, save a faldstool. There was no bed save a straw pallet in the corner. There was no window, just a drafty arrow slit, and the only comforts afforded me were a tinderbox and a bundle of candles.

It was a cell.

I turned back, sure there was some mistake, met the heavy oak door as it slammed in my face, and heard the key turn. There was no mistake. I was a prisoner.

Shit.

Well. This was far from the glorious court I had heard about from my various Milanese clients over the years. Why had my fortunes changed so, in a heartbeat? In Bolzano my lodgings were sparse, but at least they were comfortable and befit my new rank. Had my mother, in her short conference with the Milanese lord, shared her suspicions of me? How was she so sure I had betrayed her somehow? Why had she placed me in this empty cell? I even began to miss Marta, Marta who had left the carriage abruptly somewhere in Lombardy, there one day, gone the next. I thought of the deep and deadly glass lakes and their poisoned waters. I wondered if she had been dumped there, weighted down to dance on the bottom, like the figures in the lagoon. A Venetian death. Or perhaps she had been taken back to Venice and would once again rut with her kitchen-boy love. Despite her actions to me, I rather hoped that this last would be her fate. I knew my mother’s capability for revenge—she had been let down, and did not forgive. She had guessed, in the carriage that day, that Marta had failed to watch me closely, and now she was leaving it to the professionals. An armed soldier—doubtless one of the multitudes I had seen in the courtyard—paced outside. I heard his sword tip scrape my door as he switched back and forth. The watch changed, it seemed, every two hours. I was out of the world with frustration. How would Brother Guido contact me now, with a locked door and an armed guard between myself and the world? I heard the watch change once, twice, and no one else came near. I had not food nor drink, and my growling stomach soon served to remind me of the tale of Brother Guido’s ancestors, imprisoned in the Muda tower, driven to starvation so extreme they devoured each other. Nor did I have any diversions save the view from my window. I dared not take the picture from my bodice, the wooden roll from my sleeve, or my mother’s mask from my hood, lest someone burst in upon me. I had to content myself with watching a small sliver of a city through the long arrow slit that was my only light and air. The wind perished my eye and whistled and moaned in counterpoint to the percussion of the soldiers marching outside. I was trapped in an organ pipe.

On the third watch there was a knock and a burly soldier entered, with a cadet at his shoulder.

“Signorina,” he said, as if such pleasantries were alien to him. “I regret to disturb you, but you are to be searched on the orders of il Moro.”

Madonna.

I assumed il Moro was his name for his lord, but I knew the orders came from my mother and I invoked her name now, in desperation. “But sir, I am the dogaressa’s daughter!”

He blinked once. “Indeed, and I regret the necessity. But these are sensitive times and all guests must be searched, including your exalted mother.”

He lied and we both knew it. There was no way a duke would offend his noble guests with such mistrust. My heart stopped beating. They would find the painting, and the roll, and the coin, and the fifty gold ducats and mask I’d stolen from my mother. I was as good as dead. Fleetingly, I toyed with the idea of offering them a fuck apiece if they’d let me be, but I knew that the notion was hopeless—sex was my currency when I worked the streets, but for a noble maiden to lose her “reputation,” she may as well lose her life. Shit.

Mutely, frozen by the certainty of doom, I stood as the cadet searched me with surprisingly gentle hands. I stared the sergeant at arms full in the eye, defiant as I waited for the hidden things to come to light, the objects that would damn me and cost me my life. Yet incredibly, the cadet felt the roll in my sleeves and passed on to my shoulder. He felt the parchment in my bodice and passed on to my waist. He bypassed the mask in my hood. I was at once flabbergasted by my good luck and amazed by the stupidity of the soldier who searched me. If he was an example of the army outside, then they were destined to lose whatever war they waged, hands down.

Search over, the sergeant at arms thanked me, apologized again. I inclined my head, borrowing one of my mother’s gestures, not sure what to do now. I had been used to the feel of strange men’s hands on my body and was too relieved to feign insult.

“ ‘Twas a mere formality, my lady, as I said. I was asked to remain with you throughout, to make sure your honor remained intact, and the fellow here that searched you was chosen especially for his chastity, for he was once in Holy Orders.”

Then I knew. I didn’t even have to look closely at the cadet—the gentle hands, the way he passed over what was hidden without giving me away, should have told me. I didn’t have to look but I’m glad I did, for he turned at the door with his sunburst smile.

Brother Guido.