by Philip Kazan
‘You don’t have to be from Tuscany to have heard of the Aldobrandeschi,’ I pointed out.
‘No, indeed. But as I was saying, there are some from those families, younger sons mostly, I should say, who won’t bow their neck to the Medici yoke. Their words, not mine,’ he added hastily, holding up a finger. ‘Wild types. They take to banditry from time to time. There’s a band of them who live up on the other side of the mountain, and they come down here sometimes if a rich mule train is coming through.’
‘And the duke does nothing?’ I said. There was an uncomfortable feeling building inside me. Those names: Capacci. My mother had been a Capacci.
‘He sent a company of gendarmes a couple of years ago. They chased the boys around for a bit, then gave up.’
‘Good country for bandits,’ said Lorenzo. ‘They’d be fools to come near us, though.’
‘They won’t do that.’ The landlord chuckled. ‘This time of year they stay in their fortress over on the Maremma side, those that don’t go back to their own homes.’
‘Sensible of them.’ Lorenzo took out a silver toothpick he had taken from the body of a Turkish lord on Malta and began to rid himself of pork fibres.
‘They’d have been looking down at you passing by, though,’ said the landlord.
I bet you tell the pilgrims all sorts of stories, I thought. Probably hire out guards too, for a hefty price.
‘Oh, yes?’ I said aloud.
‘You rode almost beneath one of their strongholds. I’m sure you noticed it. Little village on its own spur of Amiata. Like the prow of a ship. Pietrodoro it’s called, because of the big streak of golden stone which you can see from miles away.’
My stomach almost turned itself inside out. I swallowed hard. ‘Really,’ I said.
‘Oho, yes! They’re a bad lot up there. Not all of them. But the family that owns the village, the Ellebori? Old Lodovigo—’
‘I’m off to the privy,’ I interrupted, standing up so hastily that I knocked the last of my meat off its trencher.
‘Gut’s been bothering him,’ I heard Lorenzo explain as I left.
I could feel the mountain behind me as I rushed outside. The night was clear and cold, the stars as bright and unblinking as sequins on a funeral pall. The air settled me almost at once. I was expert in mastering my emotions, after all. But although anyone coming upon me would have found me completely calm, I was roiling inside. I went to the barn. Candles were burning on long sticks at the head and the foot of the wagon-hearse. One of the men was keeping vigil.
‘I’ll take over,’ I said. ‘Go and get some food. The wine’s bad, but the landlord has a heavy hand tonight.’
‘Thanks, Condottiere!’ he said, and trotted off without a backward glance.
I sat down on the stool the soldier had left. It was frigid, but I thought my nose was catching a faint smell of decay. I hoped the cardinal’s plumber had done a good job sealing the coffin as we had at least another week on the road. It wasn’t Don Orazio in there, I knew. Our mortal bodies are but vessels for the soul – nothing more. I tried to find some comfort in that. But what was a soul, anyway? Something like air, that lived inside the body? In the heart, some said, or in the head. Perhaps. I’d seen inside men’s bodies and skulls. A pig’s heart does not look so different from a man’s, though the Church tells us that animals have no souls. For myself, I wondered if it might be something different, but then again, I was made differently from other people. Because in a way, Onorio was my soul when I was out in the world, and Onoria took up the role when I was safe and alone. Both a part of me, and yet different. Onorio was better: an ideal. The Church would have something to say about that, all right: pure blasphemy.
Whatever the truth, and it was a truth that I don’t think even the greatest philosopher could deduce, the mention of Lodovigo Ellebori’s name had turned the soul within me colder than the air outside. Lodovigo – still alive. It didn’t seem possible. But then I forced myself to think. He hadn’t been much older than my father when … when it had happened. My father had been, what? Forty years old? Dear God. That meant that Lodovigo might not even be sixty. An old man, certainly, but not a dotard. I thought about what the landlord had said – the family that owns the village – and a picture formed in my mind: Lodovigo Ellebori, whose face I could not bring myself to remember, even now, squatting in the centre of Pietrodoro and looking down at those rolling, golden lands I had so loved, directing his malevolence here and there, wherever his will took it, until it was all grimed and foul with his evil. The next day, I knew, we would be moving into a wider landscape, the flat country I had stumbled through with my bow and arrow. I’d been dying then, perhaps. The man in the coffin had saved a little girl, and he’d created someone else, without ever knowing. Now we were back here again, and one of us was a corpse. I couldn’t help wondering if it was fair that it should be this way round.
I sat and prayed for the soul of Don Orazio for hours. But I couldn’t help thinking about Lodovigo, even though I tried not to. It was only when I began to pray to Santa Celava that my pain began to recede. The hermit, the hidden one: she’d looked down on this country too. Had she sent the colonnello to find me, old finder of lost things? ‘Dear one, keep me hidden now,’ I whispered, because, despite everything, I was a little girl again, starving, wounded, alone. Then Lorenzo, drunk but still dutiful, came to find me, and I was Onorio. Not hiding, but hidden.
I was glad when we inched our way out of those lands.
We came to Florence by a roundabout way, because Don Orazio had asked that his body lie for a day and a night in the chapel of his ancestral home. Castelnuovo Valdarno was a gnarled old castle with a few half-hearted modern embellishments in the farmland between Empoli and Florence. The whole of the countryside seemed to have turned out to pay their respects. It was a loud and lavish homecoming, and I knew that my old captain had looked forward to a day like this for many years. What a trick Fortuna had played on him, I thought, as I watched his coffin welcomed by his own people, while the man himself was far, far away, beyond the reach of all worldly emotions.
And here I was, in Florence at last, riding through a grey, dismal city with crumbs on my cloak. Our little procession turned into Via de’ Tornabuoni. The tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was there, rising over the rooftops, not very far away. I recognised it from a painting that had once hung in my parents’ house. Somehow, I’d thought everything would be bigger, the city itself and its buildings. It had all the people I had imagined, though, and more. Even in the rain, the street was thronged: black-robed lawyers, priests, merchants, all milling about, all on their way to somewhere else, somewhere dry, but negotiating chance encounters with friends or colleagues, debtors or adversaries.
The church of Santa Trìnita, where the del Forese family had buried their dead for centuries, was in a piazza at the end of the street. Beyond, a bridge spanned the river. We were met by a priest, who sent to fetch some pallbearers. We waited for half an hour in the rain until they arrived. The coffin was borne with much wheezing and muttering into the church, and set down in the del Forese chapel. After all the pageantry of our journey through Tuscany, our grand entry into Florence had been so muted that we might as well have been invisible. We made arrangements to stay at the spartan hostel connected to the church, which we found ourselves sharing with a small party of Vallumbrosan monks.
The funeral was that night. I had been frantically coordinating it by letter with Don Orazio’s quartermaster, who had come to Florence ahead of us. Lorenzo and I had brought our best armour, and we helped each other with buckles and laces as the monks watched disapprovingly from a distance. Then I went and supervised the moving of the coffin into position before the altar, where a grand baldacchino of gilded wood draped in black cloth, obviously brought out for the best funerals, had been erected. The side chapels had all been hidden by black cloths, and boys were hurrying around, setting up great banks of candles. The quartermaster, a Florentine of noble birth, was checki
ng lists, and jogging up and down the aisle. Night was falling outside. The candles were lit, and the mourners began to arrive. Almost all men, many holding themselves like soldiers, all wearing that curious loose garment like a Roman toga that the quality of Florence had adopted because they believe it lends them the dignity of the ancient republic, though it makes them look like furtive nightwatchmen. I knew there were lofty and important people here; I’d looked at the quartermaster’s list: Strozzi, Petruzzi, Ricci, Capponi, Pucci, Frescobaldi. I recognised no one, of course. Don Orazio was being buried by strangers.
We stood, Don Orazio’s men, as an honour guard while the priest gave the service, hands on the hilts of our swords. It was over too fast. I was still remembering the first time I had met him as the coffin was being heaved into its niche in the del Forese chapel wall and the masons were mortaring the carved slab into place.
‘What will you do now?’ I turned around. A man, one of the noble mourners, swathed in his odd toga, was examining me with friendly curiosity. ‘You were his second in command, were you not?’
‘I left Don Orazio’s service nearly five years ago,’ I said. ‘Though we fought together on Malta and at Lepanto. I owed him a great deal. He was going to sponsor me with my own company. I had gone to Rome to discuss it with him when he died. It seemed fitting that I should accompany him on his final campaign.’
‘That’s admirably loyal of you, Condottiere Celavini.’ The man was quite serious. He had a long, pale face and small, piercing eyes. ‘And will you lead his company now?’
‘If I knew with whom I have the pleasure of speaking?’ I bowed politely.
‘Antonio Serguidi,’ he said. ‘I am secretary to His Highness the Grand Duke.’
‘I am honoured, Signor Secretary. No, Don Orazio’s company has been dissolved. My last contract expired two months ago. I am a condottiere without men. I am … free.’
‘What will be next for you?’ Serguidi narrowed his eyes.
I shrugged again. ‘To be honest, signore, I don’t really know. There is fighting in France, and I am a soldier. But for the moment, I’m enjoying my freedom. I may pass a day or two in your famous city before I leave.’
‘And you are welcome. A day or two, eh? Such a brief visit? Unless—’ Serguidi folded his arms. ‘How long have you been soldiering, Celavini?’
‘Since I was fourteen and smooth-faced, sir.’
‘Still smooth-faced.’ Serguidi gave me a sharp look down the length of his narrow, straight nose.
‘I’ve hardly needed to shave since I got this,’ I said, touching a finger to my scar. ‘All my hair fell out. The surgeon said it was with the shock of it. My scalp recovered; my beard did not.’
‘Honestly come by.’ Serguidi nodded. ‘Where did you get the wound?’
‘In Croatia,’ I said. It was such an old lie that I barely thought about it.
‘Not tired of fighting?’
‘Perhaps a little, sir. I’m not the youngest man any more, and I’ve had my share of knocks.’
‘You’re no more than twenty-five, surely!’
‘Almost thirty-four.’
‘A good age for a man to settle down. Are you married?’
‘I’ve barely stayed long enough in one place to take off my boots, let alone marry, Messer Serguidi.’
‘No matter. Now then, I have a proposition for you.’
‘A proposition?’ I blinked in surprise.
‘What do you know of Florence, Condottiere Celavini?’
I frowned. ‘In terms of …’
‘You know nothing. That gives you a distinct advantage.’ He chuckled.
‘Signore?’
‘How would you like to join our Otto di Guardia e Balia? Our Eight of Security? Other cities have police, of course, but none as good as the Otto of Florence.’
‘Police?’ I laughed politely. ‘I’m a cavalryman, Messer Serguidi.’
‘So much the better. The Otto are based in the duke’s palace, and in the Bargello. They themselves are magistrates, but they have at their disposal a force of policemen, the sbirri. There is a capo, and two comandantes, one of whom has just died of … Well, he’s dead. His position could be yours.’
‘Signore, I don’t know what to say.’
‘But you are interested?’
I opened my mouth to deny it, but something stopped me. I was a mercenary. I existed from contract to contract, and a condottiere who did not have a sheaf of job offers tucked away in case of misfortune was, in my experience, a man who did not have to work for a living. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I’d need to know a great deal more.’
‘Plainly! Only a fool would take a job before he knows what it entails. Go to the Bargello tomorrow. Say, at the ninth hour. Ask for Capo Scarfa. He’ll explain everything.’
‘Very well. Thank you, Signor Secretary, for considering me. I’m very flattered. But you seemed to know that I would be interested.’
‘At this stage in my life I can just about admit that I’m a decent judge of men, Condottiere. Besides, if you’d turned me down, I would simply have asked that fellow over there.’ He pointed casually at Lorenzo. ‘Goodnight, Messer Celavini.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next morning, I rose early and left my companions snoring away the wine they had drunk at Don Orazio’s funeral feast, from which I had slipped away after the first round of toasts. The city was already wide awake, and the sky was a piercing blue, washed clear by weeks of rain. I walked across the bridge close to our hostel, listening to the roar of the brown, swollen Arno as it rushed over the weir just downstream. There were mountains in the distance.
I strolled through the poor neighbourhood on the other side of the river, navigating by the tower of the duke’s palace, and back over a bridge lined with shops. There was a fish market just beyond, and then I was walking across the piazza in front of the Signoria itself, between the statues that stood dotted around like pieces of an abandoned game of chess. I decided to ask one of the landsknechts guarding the Signoria where I might find the Bargello. He looked down on me disdainfully but gave me directions in German-laced Italian. After a number of wrong turns, I reached a small piazza. A massive, defiantly grim building jutted into the far corner.
That was the first time I saw the Bargello. It is, to all intents and purposes, a small castle marooned in the middle of the city. The walls are topped with crenellations, and the windows are small and look out threateningly like the many eyes of a spider. All of Italy knows it by reputation: the central prison of Florence and of the whole Duchy of Tuscany. I had spent most of a lifetime in the company of men who had been inside it for one reason or another – none of them good. And I had known at least one man who had never come out again.
I walked past the guards in red and white Medici livery on either side of the main door, glancing up at the crossed keys and shields carved above it. A couple of furtive-looking men were hanging around beneath the cloisters that ran across one side of the courtyard beyond. Another liveried man was coming down the open staircase in front of me.
‘I’m looking for Capo Scarfa,’ I said.
‘Wait with the rest of them,’ he said curtly, pointing to the men lurking in the cloister.
‘I think he might be expecting me.’
‘They all say that. Unless you’ve come to inform on the fucking Emperor, you can wait there.’
‘I’m not an informer,’ I said indignantly. ‘I was told to come here by Messer Serguidi, the Grand Duke’s secretary.’
The man’s expression changed. ‘Oh, is it court business? Your pardon, signore. We get all sorts of rubbish drifting in and out of here,’ he went on brightly, leading me across the courtyard to a heavily studded door. ‘Not that … Anyway, the capo is in here, sir.’
He twisted the ring handle, which clacked ominously, and pushed open the door. ‘Capo Scarfa!’ he called, to someone I couldn’t see. ‘Someone to see you. Sent by Messer Serguidi, he says.’
‘Send him in, Renzi
,’ a voice came back. A soldier’s voice, roughened from yelling commands. I stepped across the threshold into a large, lugubrious space. The high cross-vaulted ceiling was decorated with dark and faded designs from before the time of the Medicis. Heavy tables of age-blackened oak covered the floor, each one piled with stacks of paper and vellum. The air smelt instantly familiar: men in heavy clothes, their breath, sweat, food, farts. Barracks air. I half expected to recognise the man who was making his way over to me from a table raised up on a small dais at the far end of the room. But Captain Scarfa was a stranger. Of middling height, with a thick waist and thicker arms, his shiny black beard was trimmed close to a face that was beginning to be mottled by the effects of wine. Square jaw, large broken nose, surprisingly pale eyes under heavy brows. A purposeful face, made for use, like an engineer’s tool, or like a weapon.
‘Are you the man Secretary Serguidi met last night?’ Scarfa demanded. His expression of studied boredom was really as sharp as a needle. ‘The mercenary?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Apparently.’ He snorted. ‘Serguidi thinks you might be a replacement for the late Comandante Milanesi. According to the worthy secretary’s memorandum, you were Orazio del Forese’s second in command.’ He eyed me sceptically.
‘A few years ago, yes,’ I said. ‘More recently I served Don Pietro della Tamerice in the same capacity.’
‘Is that so?’ Scarfa looked more interested. ‘So you were at Lepanto?’
‘I was. And Malta.’
‘Hmm. Sit down, sir.’ He led me over to his raised desk and waved to one of the chairs in front of it. I sat down, and he took the other. ‘Your name is Celavini. What is your family?’
‘We are Tuscan. My father’s family were local nobility from the hills around Montalcino.’ My false past rolled off my tongue as glibly as it always did.
‘You, presumably, are a younger son.’