The Botticelli Secret

42

I woke in my cell at dawn, dressed still and stiff with cold—Zephyrus had taken his revenge by puffing his cool spring winds into my organ pipe of a tower and fluted me awake with the dawn.

I watched the sun rise over the city and strike the silver pinnacles of the cathedral. From here, too, I could see the twin towers of Sant’Ambrogio, and only these reminded me that last night was not a dream. I took the parchment from my bodice to look at the map once more but had to stuff it back instantly as the key turned and the door opened. There stood the sergeant at arms who had overseen the search yesterday. Holding a bolt of flame-colored silk.

“Your lady mother begs an audience with you in her chambers,” he said briefly.

‘Twas not a suggestion.

Instantly my heart began to thump and my cheeks heated, banishing the cold. Did she somehow know how and where I’d spent the night, using the same sorcery she’d used to guess I’d left my room in Bolzano?

“She bids you put this on.” The sergeant tossed the silk on the straw pallet. And I was a little cheered—I wouldn’t waste precious silk on a daughter that was for the chop, would you?

I wondered if the fellow would watch me dress—something I was used to back in the old days—but the door closed again. I wriggled out of my gown and into the flame-colored one. I was glad to say good-bye to the besmattered rose silk, for it was stiff with sweat from my long carriage ride and then my run through the streets of Milan the night before. I sniffed under my arms and wished I had some cloves to rub in my pits, but I would have to do. At least my mother had not sent a maid to dress me, for then the cartone might have been discovered, along with the money belt, wooden map roll, and the page from the Bible. My hair was loose and a mass of tangles, whipped into a bird’s nest by my windy tower, but I had no way of dressing it, no comb, no mirror. I combed it with my fingers as best I could, yanking through the worst of the knots and making one heavy braid, which I pulled over one shoulder. Not sure what to do, I knocked on my own door, and the sergeant turned the key, opened the door, and took my arm without a word.

I wrapped my mink around me and followed the soldier’s broad back down the same stairs my friend and I had taken last night. I was taken across the parade ground, still rimed with frost and crunching underfoot. A division of soldiers were being drilled, their sergeant’s voice echoing from the four red walls, bloodier than ever in the bright morning. I looked among the men beneath the ocher cloaks and copper helmets for Brother Guido, but he was not there. Had my mother recognized him? Had she had him arrested once more? I thought not—my mother never spoke to the little people, never looked them in the eye, she would never seek the face of a nobleman in a battalion of soldiers. But perhaps she had spied upon me, knew my movements of last night. My hatred of her, for imprisoning me, and starving me too, deepened to fear.

I crossed a small moat to the residence and entered a palace of such splendor I could not believe my poor prison was part of the same castle. Every wall was hung with apricot silk and cloth of gold, and the Sforza serpent was everywhere, fixing the court with a watchful single eye.

Nehushtan.

My mother’s apartments were just as beauteous, painted the pale blue of an eggshell, with silver cords sewn into the fabric of the walls. She sat at her looking glass in a gown of flame silk to match my own, to match also, I realized with a jolt, the little flames that adorned the cloak of Mercury—Milan. Was everything a key or a signpost to the conspiracy in which she was steeped? My mother was combing her own hair with a sandalwood comb, while her feet sat in a silver ewer filled with rose water. The air was sweetened with the scent but my fear soured to anger. The bitch had me locked in a tower, and she bathed in silver like the Queen of Milan.

But once again my mother surprised me. She set aside the comb, smiled graciously, as if I had just returned from a game of tennis, not a prison cell.

“Daughter,” she said, spreading her arms in welcome, “I am right glad to see you. I trust your accommodation is not too uncomfortable?”

Fortunately, she did not wait for a reply, for I had some of my choicest words ready.

“I am happy to tell you that you have to endure such necessary privation for only one night more. You understand, of course, that I could not risk losing the thing dearest to me. After your travel plans in Venice.”

Hmmm. So perhaps she didn’t know what I had got up to in Bolzano. She certainly didn’t seem to know what I had got up to last night.

“For I have good news. Your father this way comes—he will be here tomorrow.”

Good news for whom? I wondered. I remained surly and silent.

“And he will of course have our own guards, so we will have to trespass on Lord Ludovico’s soldiers no longer.”

Madonna. At last I took her meaning. If the ducal guards were coming to watch me, I would never get away again. I’d have to get a message to Brother Guido. We’d have to leave tonight.

“And there is a further surprise, which I will let our lord duke share with you. For he desires that we accompany him this morning; he has great wonders to show us. Tell me, have you yet broken your fast?”

“If you mean have I had anything to eat, then no,” I said bluntly. I was not sure how to behave to this woman. In Venice I had seen a block of glass in my father’s palace, seemingly crystal white but which split the light into seven colors. A prism, Signor Cristoforo named it. My mother was just such a one—she had seven colors at least, and I never knew which hue of her character would appear next. But she did not seem to heed my rudeness, merely waved a hand to her lady’s maids.

“And tell them to bring me supper too, for I had fuck all last night either,” I yelled after the retreating maid.

My mother’s brows shot up to her hairline. “Soothly? An oversight, I’m sure.”

An oversight. Too busy feasting on suckling pig and march-pane to spare a crust for her daughter.

“Let us talk a little, while we are alone,” she said. (My mother had about three maids in the room—I told you she didn’t notice the little people.) “Softer! You are not shoeing a horse!” This last to one of those maids, who was drying my mother’s feet on a linen cloth. My mother kicked out and sent the poor woman sprawling on the rushes. “You know, of course,” she continued without pause, “why your accommodation here is a little less . . . commodious than in Bolzano?”

I watched the unfortunate maid scuttle to the door. I shrugged, not wishing to give anything away.

She held up one long white hand, and between her fingers, flashing in the sun, she rolled a silver coin.

My heart thumped so loud she must hear it.

It was the angel from the mine in Bolzano. That I’d picked up. And lost.

She collected my expression. “Yes. It fell from your sleeve as you slept in the carriage.”

The tinkle of metal that had woken me up, to see the lakes of Lombardy outside the window.

“I knew you had been out that night,” she said. “Marta, as you will note, is no longer with us.”

Whether or not Marta was back in Venice or with the Almighty was not clear, and my mother did not expand.

“Sooner or later, Luciana, you will see that you cannot win, and obedience to myself and your father, and indeed your husband, will prove the most direct path to happiness. Disobedience brings only privation, imprisonment, and despair.” She rose and began to walk the room purposefully, like a lawyer giving weight to her pronouncements. “Forget whatever you think you know of the business of politics; you are in error. Seek not to know further than the things you are told, for your own safety. That said, in deference to your overweening curiosity about matters of state, you will today be taken into the confidence of the great Ludovico Sforza. Look and learn since you are so keen, and tomorrow will make a new beginning. Ah, your meal is here.” She switched smoothly from politics to breakfast with no change in tone.

The repast, when it came, almost made up for the threats—salted beef, beer, fruit, and good white bread. I wolfed down the lot, as my mother watched me from under veiled lids, for all the world like Nehushtan. When I’d finished, I belched loudly for her benefit. She did not flinch nor censure but surprised me again with her next gambit.

“Your hair is a disaster,” she said. “Chiara. Bring the comb and the oil. And, let me see. Yes, the moonstones, I think, will meet the case.”

Her elderly lady’s maid, whom I’d recognized from Venice, brought the needful things from my mother’s traveling cabinets. My mother placed me before the mirror and dressed my hair herself, her touch surprisingly soft and skillful. She combed my knotted locks into smooth skeins and twisted little ripples of curls to be pinned up with the moonstones, leaving half of the mass to fall down my back. When she had done, she clasped my shoulders and looked into the mirror beside me. We met each other’s eyes somewhere behind the glass. Two blond green-eyed women, dressed in flame silk, our blood relationship writ all over our faces, in the wideness of the eye, the dark wing of the brow, the small upturned nose, and the full rose lips. She did not say anything as she pressed her cheek to mine, but I got the point.

We were family.

Cloaked, booted, and masked (“for you will be among soldiers, dear”), my mother sent for the sergeant at arms again, and we were led from the residence down a flight of stone steps and past an ornamental lake stuffed with carp. The fish flicked their golden bellies to the sun as they turned in the water. I could have flipped one out, crunched his head, and eaten him whole, for I was still starving.

Into this picturesque court came the duke and his retinue, at a swift pace—I noticed il Moro always seemed to march. Not walk. His mien was military, his business war—everything about him martial. In the morning light I noted the duke’s dusky skin and olive-black eyes and hair, and understood, for the first time, why I heard him everywhere dubbed il Moro—the Moor.

Again he greeted us in his soldierly way and was as bluff and friendly to me as yestereve, as if I had not spent the night in one of his cells.

“Come,” he said. “I will show you great wonders, madam and miss, that we talked of at dinner.”

With that, he led us down a little loggia, arched black and white in strong sun, and unlocked a low door with the hand that wore the Medici ring. He turned to his guards. “Six stay, six go,” he ordered. “No Romans.”

The sergeant at arms counted out the men. “You, two Milanese. You, from Maremma. You from Siena. You from Modena, and, Pisan, you.” I looked up at the word, and saw that Brother Guido was the Pisan picked to guard us.

We entered the dark door and spiraled down on a left-turning stair, the soldier’s sandals clattering behind. Down, down, down to a vast chamber flooded with light from arched window shafts that reached through twelve feet of solid rock to the upper courts of the castle. I was reminded again of the covered causeway where I had run till and from last night. But if the causeway had been inhabited by such creatures as I saw here, I would never have left the castle.

Madonna.

They were great beasts of wood and iron, towers of siege standing high like giants, war machines with teeth like dragons. Constructed on a grand scale with wheels and pulleys and ropes, and joists and cannon, and bristling with blades.

We moved as one down the huge hall, cavernous as a cathedral, but a place to worship war, not God. And as if intoning the Scripture, Ludovico Sforza began to speak in a tongue that I recognized as Latin. Was that why the duke had specified no Romans? Would people from Rome be more likely to know the language of the church? I, of course, understood but one word in a hundred. My mother, nodding at the duke’s instruction, understood all. But I knew, with a fierce pride in my chest, that there was another here that would understand every word of il Moro’s commentary and would be able to relate it to me in time.

Each creature had its attendants, its keeper; engineers, tinkering, adjusting, experimenting, running trials, adding a bolt here or a nail there, planing wood or shaving metal. And at the hub of it all, a small ugly man, his features obscured by beard and moustaches. Who bowed low to the duke and then proceeded to gabble to him, in Latin faster and more fluid than his master; a firecracker of a man, fairly bursting with ideas and passions for these things he had made. By the twang of his Latin I knew him for a Tuscan. I knew that this must be the engineer from Vinci that Brother Guido had mentioned the night before. In another moment I knew more, for he was presented to my mother as Signor Leonardo da Vinci. As the two men talked and my mother listened, I wondered briefly why I, who had been kept in the dark deliberately by my mistrustful mother was now being shown such things. My mother played me at cards but was showing me her hand—she was as good as admitting that a war was planned and that she was a part of it, and this new war, with this new army, would be fought in a new way. Fought with machines that burgeoned from the fevered imagination of this little Tuscan engineer, whose ideas swelled and burst like birthing sacs, to spew forth blood of innocent soldiers devoured by his machines. My mother turned to me and echoed my thoughts in a low voice.

“These are engines of death. Whosoever has such things cannot lose a war. Do you understand me? Cannot lose.”

Now I knew the reason for disclosure. More threats.

I met her eyes. “I understand that. What are you really telling me?” I noted the duke and his engineer had stopped their discourse to listen.

“That it is useless to resist what is coming. It is as inevitable as the seasons.”

The little Tuscan added a Latin saying (which was actually destined to be the third Latin tag that I know): “Ver fugo hiberna.”

And they all laughed together. I hated them all, traders in terror, dealers in death.

“And now, let us retreat from warlike sights and enter instead the realms of love and marriage,” said my mother, wrapping one arm around my shoulder.

“Mars greets Hymen, eh?” Ludovico barked. “ ‘Tis true. Lady, be glad.” He looked fondly at me, as if he were a favorite uncle, not my jailer. “For tomorrow, we greet at court your betrothed, Lord Niccolò della Torre of Pisa.”

I almost dropped to the floor. “Lord Niccolò? Here? Tomorrow?” I piped as loudly as I could, so that Brother Guido might hear.

“Yes.” My mother smiled down on me, indulgently. “Is that not joyous? He comes to join our party and reacquaint himself with you, the queen of his heart.”

I felt sick and could only hope that this information had reached Brother Guido at the back of the ranks. We all moved to leave; I hung back to fiddle with my shoe until my friend had caught up with me, then at the foot of the stair I stumbled and threw out an arm to Brother Guido to steady myself. It worked.

“You—help the signorina up the stair, she is faint with the news that her lover comes!” And Ludovico laughed, his booming voice ringing up the spiral.

Brother Guido and I had six turns, perhaps, to say what needed to be said. It took less.

“I’ll come to you tonight, as we planned,” he murmured so low I could hardly hear above the footsteps, “between Vespers and Compline.”

“But did you not hear? Niccolò is expected tomorrow! He will know you at once.”

He seemed startled, recovered quickly. “But I will be disguised by numbers, he will not note the footsoldiers.”

There was not time to state that my mother had seen him but once at the Medici wedding, but Niccolò had grown up with him, boy and man. I went straight to the poniard’s point. “Let me tell you,” I hissed. “I’ve known fellows of your cousin’s tastes before, and the one thing they like doing best is looking at footsoldiers.” We were nearly at the door. “Moreover, from tomorrow I am to be under the watch of my father’s guards this time. And they know their business.”

That did it. “Very well. Then we must go tonight. Be ready.”

I nodded quickly. One turn to go to the light, one more question. “What did the Tuscan engineer say in Latin?”

He looked at me once. “He said, ‘Spring chases the winter.’ ”

The rest of the day I spent in an ague of anticipation. I recognized the symptoms well from the day before my intended flight from Venice. My appetite disappeared and I was a weathercock spinning from excitement to terror. My cheeks burned and my eyes flamed, such that on the way to mass in il Moro’s litter my mother asked if I had a fever. At which Lord Ludovico slapped me on the back, as if we were sharing a grappa in the guard house and said, “Fever indeed. Cupid’s fever, I’ll warrant. For nothing else puts roses in a maid’s cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes than the reunion with her true love—these symptoms are all in della Torre’s cause, mark my words.”

As I coughed from the blow and smiled politely, I thought that I could not fault his logic—my fevered state was all due to an assignation with my true love who bore the della Torre name, but he was in error as to which branch of that family tree I awaited.

And thus I found myself in the third Milanese basilica I had been in this day. I had visited church more times since I had come to the city than in the whole of the last four years. This time we worshipped in the great Duomo, the mass of spiny pinnacles without, with a vast many-pillared nave within. The light streamed in through the stained glass with a greenish hue, turning the pillars to bone—they reached above and curved about like a giant rib cage. Not Daniel in the den this time but Jonah in the whale—I was in the belly of a beast; would I ever be able to escape this city? The service went on for two hours; I fretted for both of them and never heard a word of it.

Back at the castle I fidgeted until feast time—this night I was invited but might as well not have been, for not a morsel passed my nervous lips. I had to be back in my room by Vespers, so I excused myself from the pomp, pleading that I must get my sleep to be fresh for my betrothed. My mother seemed to believe my protests but still assigned me two guards to escort me back and turn the key.

Once back in the cell I had little to prepare. Be ready, Brother Guido had instructed. But I had long since learned to carry all that I needed on my person at all times. I took out my warmest cloak, and bundled my mother’s mask within it, and laid them across the wooden faldstool that was the one seat in the room. Then I set myself to wait for the bells. As one church, then another, then the great booming bells of the cathedral gave tongue to the hour of Vespers, I heard a shuffling outside the door and the key turn. So soon! My heart leaped to my mouth and I leaped to my feet.

The door swung wide.

‘Twas my mother.