The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  I took a deep breath. Vennini. Always Vennini. ‘I’ll have some new information later today,’ I said.

  ‘Good. The sooner the better.’ He dismissed me with a distracted wave. I left by the magistrates’ entrance so that I wouldn’t have to talk to Scarfa. He’d want his report, and I didn’t want to stand in front of him without it and pretend to be contrite. The clock on the Palazzo Vecchio told me that it was after the eleventh hour. As I walked across the piazza, one of my men came out of the crowd, saluted me, and reported that his patrol had caught a pair of cutpurses. I feigned interest, clapped him on the back and slipped away. Elbowing my way through the Mercato Vecchio, I caught sight of Sergeant Gherardi arguing with a well-known pimp. Florence was going about its business all around me, teeming with life like a midden, or some dead thing that is forever rotting, but never rotted away, and I was one of the creatures battened onto it, one of those misshapen things that shun the light and turn from it to burrow deeper into the warm foulness. Amerigo Ormani. Three dependants. Payments cease. Fascinating. A sudden desire came over me, like the first surge of a tertian fever, to unbutton my doublet, unlace my shirt, loosen the bindings and show this world of strangers what kind of monster walked among them.

  I was still in this state when I came once again to the door of the Palazzo Salvucci. The sensation that I had already stripped myself naked was so strong that I had to run my hands down my clothing to make sure I was still Comandante Onorio Celavini. The slave girl opened the door and led me into a wood-panelled room hung with smoke-darkened portraits and a large allegorical scene of Daphne pursued through a forest by Apollo. It must have come from an old wedding chest. I found myself staring at the little figures in their antique clothes: at Apollo, in high boots, holding a bow, running through orange trees heavy with fruit; at Daphne, slender girl, reaching up towards the blue sky, stretching, her thin mantle falling away from her white breasts, her clasped hands bursting into branches, twigs, a crown of glossy green. Between the trees, gentle hills of gold and grey fading into light.

  ‘It’s very old,’ came a voice from behind me. I felt myself jump out of my skin, though in reality, years of training had kept my flesh steady. ‘From the days of Cosimo il Vecchio. My husband’s grandmother’s wedding chest.’

  ‘A lovely thing,’ I said with difficulty. My scar was stinging as if the whip of a jellyfish had just been drawn across my face. I forced myself to turn around. In front of me was a woman of about my age, dressed in a gown of dove grey damask patterned with golden lilies, over an embroidered petticoat of pale blue. She had freckled skin, a delicately curved nose and eyes that were slightly too small for her face, offset by the heavy curve of dark eyebrows. Her black hair was pulled back and fixed with a silver tiara. Even though when I had last seen her she had been a girl of fourteen, sitting across from me in the village square on the Feast of Santa Clara, I knew her at once. She was smiling, a polite, neutral smile, but as our eyes met it froze in place across her lips. She gasped and took a step backwards.

  ‘Smeralda Ellebori,’ I said.

  ‘Oh! Holy Mother …’ She gasped, and her hand jumped to the cameo locket around her neck. ‘Bartolomeo …’ She squeezed her eyes shut, breathed, and recomposed her smile. She opened her eyes again. ‘Your deepest pardon, Comandante. It is this awful heat. It gives one fancies.’ But her expression changed again, her body began to tremble, and she staggered backwards, feeling behind her, and sank into the nearest chair.

  ‘Are you not well, signora?’ I asked. ‘Or did you take me for someone else?’

  ‘Someone …? Yes. How foolish.’ She fanned herself with a stiff hand. Her lips had gone white. ‘Perhaps …’

  ‘Perhaps I look like someone from Pietrodoro,’ I said. My voice was nothing more than a hiss of air, the scrape of a whetstone along a steel edge.

  ‘Who are you?’ she shrieked. Bolt upright in the chair, one hand at her neck, the other gripping the armrest. It was carved in the form of a long, supple dog. ‘Who—?’ The word ended abruptly, as though a hand had been clamped across her mouth.

  I almost told her. It took everything in my power, all that I had taught myself over the years, all that I had learnt. But at the last moment, as it seemed as though the body beneath my clothes was going to burn through them of its own accord, I remembered the old Mother Superior, sitting beside my bed, years ago. ‘It must be hard to have saved your life at the cost of your nature,’ she had said, and she had sounded so sad, because yes, it was true. It was hard. But I had saved myself. Survival over nature. I rubbed the scar on my neck, my gesture mirroring that of the woman sitting before me.

  ‘I am Onorio Celavini,’ I said. ‘Bartolomeo Ormani was my cousin. Do you not remember me?’

  ‘You look so very much like him,’ she whispered.

  ‘Do I?’

  She nodded faintly.

  ‘Which Bartolomeo do I resemble? The one who was murdered in Pietrodoro, or the one who kept a mistress here in Florence, before he had her head almost hacked from her body two nights ago?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘In the name of God!’ I barked, and she winced at the violence in my voice, the ugliness of it. ‘Why would you take the trouble to lie? You cannot comprehend the offence you cause me!’ She stared at me, her eyes showing white, seeing a ghost, but seeing the commander of the Grand Duke’s police as well.

  ‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I knew the magistrates would come, after … after …’

  ‘Zanobia Linucci was killed like peasants kill their autumn sow, and left for the world to stare at, to slander,’ I said. I was standing over her now, legs apart, balled-up hands on my hips, and I saw myself as she saw me, a man with power, with weapons, who could reach out and take her life with no more consequence than if she beat one of her slaves. ‘They left her with no honour or dignity. And a man who stole my … my cousin’s name caused it to be done.’

  ‘I hate him!’ Suddenly she was out of her chair and facing me. We were less than an arm’s length apart. I could see the fine down of dark hair on her upper lip, the sweat beading on her freckled forehead. ‘Do you hear me? I hate him! Arrest him! Make him pay!’

  ‘But who is he?’ I said quietly.

  She blinked. ‘Augusto,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember Augusto, my older brother? If you are who you say you are. I’m confused!’ She turned away and paced stiffly towards the window. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to a policeman!’

  ‘Look at me, Smeralda! We used to play in the terraces below the walls,’ I said. ‘You, me, Bartolomeo’s sister. Your brother Federigo. We would hunt rats with your father’s dog in the priest’s barn. Once you thought a snake had bitten you when you put your hand inside a hollow tree, but it was a hornet. Your hand swelled up like a melon.’

  ‘I don’t remember you at all,’ she said, her voice soft with confusion. ‘But there’s so much I don’t remember. I don’t want to. I’ve never wanted to. And now this has come to me.’ Her hands were fists around the rich fabric of her skirt. I felt a wave of cold fury. This woman, who had drifted unchanged, from then to now, into this soft existence, was inconvenienced by the past.

  ‘Your family killed them all,’ I said. ‘You gave them the lie of friendship, of love, and then you destroyed them!’

  ‘Not me! I tried to stop them! I tried to prevent it, but what was I? Nothing! They brushed me aside like a moth! I thought they would kill me like a moth, a beetle – like this!’ She clapped her hands. I flinched in surprise. ‘Because once they knew, once Father and Augusto found out, there was nothing, not in the whole of Creation, that could have stopped them.’ She was facing me now, her back pressed against one of the Flemish tapestries on the wall.

  ‘What did they find out?’ I asked. ‘What could they possibly have cared about? We … They were going to leave Pietrodoro. Bartolomeo told me. Don Amerigo was buying land in Montalcino. There was nothing. Your families were at peace.’

&
nbsp; ‘At peace? Dear God!’ She pulled viciously at a lock of her hair. ‘Yes, yes, we thought so. We believed that everything had healed. But we were so young, and so blind.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ It was all I could do to stop myself grabbing her shoulders. I didn’t understand this at all. My world, my memories seemed to be lurching in an unknown direction.

  ‘Bartolomeo and me,’ she said, and she seemed to have let all of her vitality out with those three words. Her legs buckled, and then I had to catch her under the arms and help her down onto the bench beneath the window.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. I was kneeling too, because I wasn’t sure what my body would do if it wasn’t anchored to the ground.

  ‘We were betrothed,’ she said, so quietly that her voice was almost drowned out by a pair of friars bantering out in the street.

  ‘Betrothed.’ I fumbled with the buttons on my collar. The ruff was too tight against my scar; I felt as if I were choking.

  ‘We were in love. So in love. And that was perfect – don’t you see? We would unite our two families. We would heal the whole of Pietrodoro. Don’t you remember it, how the piazza between our house and the Ormanis’ felt like a wound? All the blood they’d spilt there, for centuries. Since the mountains were made – that’s what they used to say. We believed that my father and Amerigo were ready. There would be a great, beautiful wedding and we would be … we would be happy.’

  ‘But he was going into the Church. Bartolomeo was going to be a cardinal,’ I said in disbelief.

  ‘He’d changed his mind. That was another thing that was going to be wonderful. Don Amerigo always wanted a son who would share his passions: a soldier son. Instead he had little Onoria, who turned herself into a boy just to please her father. Don’t you remember her? It was so sad.’

  ‘She could fight,’ I managed to say.

  ‘Yes, she could fight! But girls ought not to fight. Bartolomeo was going to give up his books and become his father’s pupil, and poor Onoria would have gone back to being a girl. Everything would have been put right. Put into order. And then I … Oh, God. Stupid, stupid.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I told my brother Federigo. I didn’t know that he was angry with Augusto about something. But he was. He was raging. He told Augusto about us. I don’t know why – perhaps to show that he knew things, that he had secrets. He wanted to be like Augusto, like Onoria wanted to be like Don Amerigo. But Augusto became like a madman. He told my father, and then I found out that my family was a flask of poison. Father had inherited a hatred of the Ormanis from his father, and after Florence attacked Siena and the republic fell, he loathed them even more. Augusto fought at Scannagallo, on the Sienese side. He’s never forgiven the Medicis, and neither did Father. I didn’t understand that the warmth that seemed to have grown between us and the Ormanis was all a pretence. When Father found out about Bartolomeo and me, he and Augusto decided to act. Did you ever come to our village feast, for Santa Clara’s day? They waited, smiled, plotted until that night. I didn’t know. I watched them pouring wine, more and more wine, heard them laughing, sang the old songs. God help me, but I thought: One day, my love and I will be at the head of a great, happy, united family.’ Smeralda buried her face in her hands. Her tiara slipped out of the thick braid and fell to the floor. ‘Then I woke up in the night, and there were screams, and fire … They killed them all. Don Amerigo, Donna Maria, Onoria and … and Bartolomeo. The servants. Everyone.’ She looked up defiantly. ‘But my love died with honour, the only honour in my village that night. He fought Augusto hand to hand and made him a cripple before he died. And I was glad. The last pleasure I have ever felt in this world was when I saw Augusto carried back to our house and knew he would suffer for ever.’

  She stopped, and sat there, gasping as though she had just run a race. The expression on her face was half disbelief, half terror.

  ‘And then?’ What happened while I was wandering alone? I wanted to ask. What happened while your poor Onoria was dying, and had to save herself by hiding inside her own skin? What happened after your foolishness brought ruin to us all? But then I discovered that there was no hatred in me for this woman. We had both been destroyed by the same men. We both walked through the world hiding our open wounds.

  ‘Then?’ She laughed bitterly and turned her face away from me. ‘Then I heard my mother pleading with my father not to kill me too and throw me into the blaze across the piazza, for the dishonour I had brought to the Ellebori. Augusto was screaming as they carried him upstairs, and Father was screaming outside my bedroom. Both of them, howling for my death. I heard him order his groom to strangle me. I was getting ready to throw myself out of the window rather than being slaughtered like that, but then my mother put her body across the doorway, and Federigo was begging … God knows what happened. Their blood cooled. A few days later I was sent off to the priory in Radicofani, and the year after that I was married off to my husband in San Giminiano, where the Salvuccis have most of their lands. We moved here soon afterwards, to the fury of my father and Augusto. Their hatred of the Medicis and of this city never dimmed. Meanwhile, they had declared themselves lords of Pietrodoro and stole everything that the Ormanis had once owned, because there was no one left to challenge them. I have heard that you cannot even speak the name Ormani in the village now, and if you do, no one remembers, or pretends not to.

  ‘Then my father and Augusto allied themselves with the Aldobrandeschis and made a sort of rebellion against the power of Florence. They aren’t rebels, though: they’re bandits, outlaws. Girolamo is with them. He became a brute as well.’ She twisted her face into a mask of loathing. ‘Antonio died of tertian fever along with my mother within a few years of the Ormanis. My father died two years ago, in his bed.’

  ‘May his soul be in hell,’ I muttered. Smeralda gave no sign of having heard.

  ‘I thought I was free of them here in Florence,’ she said. ‘But around the time of my father’s death – I didn’t go back to Pietrodoro to see him buried, or to say a prayer for him, I can assure you – Augusto appeared. He came here, to my house, grinning like the Devil himself. “I have a new name,” he said. “Can you guess it? Bartolomeo Ormani!” He had come back into my life just to torment me. I mean, what other explanation could there have been? He made my husband introduce him to his bank, the Miniati, and forced a loan out of him. Then I heard that Augusto had installed a mistress here, under my nose. Under my family’s nose. I am a Salvucci now, I washed Pietrodoro and Ellebori from me like the dust from that stinking charnel house of a village. My brother delighted in his masquerade, Comandante. Satisfying his lust here in the city of his enemies, passing himself off as the man he’d killed, the man I loved.’

  ‘Did you know that Donna Zanobia was an Orsini?’ I asked, bringing up the dead because I couldn’t bear to hear any more of this living woman’s suffering.

  Smeralda’s shoulders stiffened. ‘I made friends with her, you know,’ she said. ‘Out of pity, at first, because what woman deserves to be tied to a man like Augusto? But I discovered that I liked her. She was so different to me. Her family had used her as a gaming piece, which was something we shared. But she was outgoing and worldly, and I am … as you see me. We kept our friendship from Augusto, but I tell you, Comandante, the last two years were the most carefree of my life.’

  ‘Your brother’s mistress. It sounds like a strange friendship.’

  ‘Mistress? Oh, no, Comandante. Zanobia was Augusto’s wife.’

  I stared at her. ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘But it’s true. They married in secret. Augusto dreams about an alliance with the barons of Pitigliano against Duke Francesco. The present baron is in debt to the Medicis, but his brother is more independent: he knew about the marriage. Augusto wooed Zanobia and she saw some advantage for herself, though I never understood it. She soon realised what a monster he is.’ Smeralda gave me an almost defiant half-smile. ‘Pietro wasn’t the first, Comand
ante. But he wasn’t worth dying for. Or perhaps he was. How would I know?’

  ‘Where is Augusto now?’

  ‘On his way back to Pietrodoro, I suppose. I don’t care. Can I tell you something that is horribly selfish, Comandante? Although my friend is dead, I rejoice that my brother will have no cause to visit Florence ever again.’

  I reached out and took her hands. ‘He never will, signora. On behalf of the Otto di Guardia, I can make that promise.’

  ‘Bartolomeo’s cousin.’ She smiled for the first time. ‘You look so much like him. But he would be … older.’ Tears were streaming down her face, but she let them fall unchecked.

  ‘He would be. A little,’ I said. ‘Donna Smeralda, would you bear witness in front of the Otto? I’ll see to it that you are treated graciously.’

  She hesitated and bit the inside of her mouth. She had used to do that. How strange, to remember such a thing. ‘Yes. Gladly,’ she said at last.

  I laid her hands in her lap and stood up. ‘Perhaps it won’t be necessary.’

  ‘I am ready, Comandante. And then perhaps you will come back and talk with me about … about the old days, and Bartolomeo, and Onoria?’ she said, almost tripping over the words.

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said. I was at the door when my thoughts cleared enough to ask one last question. ‘What happened to Federigo?’

  Smeralda was dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. When she turned to me, half in light, half in shadow, her face streaked red, she seemed to have become a child again. ‘He joined the Church,’ she said. ‘He went to Spain and became a bishop. Now he’s a cardinal in Rome. One of the youngest.’ The pride in her voice was heartbreaking.

  ‘That was Bartolomeo’s destiny.’

  ‘Yes. Federigo hated fighting. He hated cruelty. I don’t know what it was that made him so angry with Augusto.’ She smiled again and shook her head. ‘I don’t know whether Federigo would ever have married. But after … after it happened, it was little Onoria that he cried over. There was nothing left of them. Just ash. Just …’ She hugged herself and didn’t say anything more. I left silently, and when I stepped out into the street, for a moment I didn’t know where I was.