Zo

by Leanne Owens

  ‘He is so angry for one so young,’ sighed Leo, dramatically.

  ‘No more,’ Elli moved to stand between them, raising a palm outward to both. 'I adore the two of you, but this constant fighting is like having a young dog and an old dog who won’t stop snapping at each other.’

  ‘She called you old,’ Michelangelo pointed out.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned Elli, shaking a finger at Angelo. ‘You know I didn’t mean he was old, just that he is older than you. You are different, but you are both amazing. Leo is interested in a thousand things at once while you like to focus completely on one or two tasks, and complete them before moving on to another task. Different, but equally valuable.’

  ‘My mind soars,’ Leo grinned, ‘while the youngster plods along.’

  ‘I finish what I start,’ Angelo snarled back at him, ‘while you run from one unfinished project to the next. I aim for perfection. You can’t even aim for completion.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Elli demanded. ‘You will make me cry if you continue to fight.’

  She wasn’t at all close to crying, but suspected it would influence them more than her anger. They stopped bickering that day, but their contempt for each other never stopped.

  Lorenzo had loved them both, and it would have saddened him to see their enmity. In the few years that Angelo had lived under his care, he had been like a son to him, while Leo had been a good friend. Both had the brilliant minds that Zo valued, but they rubbed each other the wrong way.

  Luckily, they both had so many engagements all over Italy that they were rarely in Florence at the same time.

  ***

  Ally sighed and returned to the twenty-first century. ‘This jumping out of order will be confusing to you, though. That day didn’t take place until long after everything else. It was over thirty years earlier that Leo came to live with us in 1476 after a nasty court case. He was with us almost until the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478, and we became close friends in that time. Ten years later Clarice died, a year after that, Michelangelo arrived, and there was another three years and Zo left us. That was 1492. After that, there were the troubles brought by Savonarola. Leo didn’t return to Florence until 1500 and then I had many years of trying to keep him and Angelo apart when they were in town.’

  ‘Of the two of them, who did you like best?’ asked Sandra, feeling a little like the gossip columnists who often interviewed her.

  ‘I enjoyed Leo’s company most,’ Ally confided. ‘His mind twirled and sang. For most of my years with Zo, he was my favourite of all his friends – always funny and brilliant. It was no wonder everyone wanted him around. He was there for me, long after Zo was gone.’

  Her voice faded on the last words, and she stopped talking, her thoughts on a time long ago. She didn’t seem to notice when her friends looked at each other and quietly left the veranda, leaving her in peace.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Pazzi Conspiracy

  ‘I didn’t think it would happen,’ Lynette told the others as they ate lunch in the cafeteria, ‘but I am so into the story of Elli. It’s brilliant.’

  ‘I know!’ Sandra agreed. ‘It felt like I was hearing someone talk about what their friends said the other day, only those friends are Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.’

  Nick glanced at Peter who had gone quiet and was gazing morosely at his half-finished lunch. ‘How are you coping, Peter? Are you ready for the next instalment?’

  ‘I guess,’ he replied. ‘I just worry about where it’s going. What’s going to happen when she finishes the story? Is that it? You all pack up and go home and she continues living in two worlds at the one time?’

  ‘You always were a worrier, Pete,’ Sandy nudged him with a foot under the table. ‘It’ll work out. She has a plan, and we all should know by now that when she has a plan, it works out.’

  ‘Her last plan wasn’t so flash,’ he muttered. ‘Trying repeatedly to kill herself wasn’t a good plan.’

  ‘But you heard her, Pete,’ Sandy continued, trying to bolster his spirits. ‘She said Zo came to her, and he doesn’t want her dead, he wants her to live. And he wants her to tell us everything. This is a good plan.’

  ‘Yeah, Pete,’ Lynette gave him a gentle kick under the table, too. ‘Get with the plan, man.’

  ‘I plan,’ he glared at the two women, ‘to invest in soft toed slippers for you two. Can you stop kicking me?’

  ‘Never!’ They both laughed.

  When they returned to Ally’s room, Gina determined that she was in a good state of mind to continue spending time with her friends, and could even undertake a stroll in the gardens with them. With the perfect autumn weather continuing, they headed outdoors to walk the paths and find a place to sit. Their conversation started with the movie Sandy had walked away from, as well as the conference that Lynette had left, and, by the time they found a secluded garden with enough comfortable chairs for seven, they were ready to go back to Florence.

  They pulled the chairs into a semi-circle around the two-seater padded lounge that Ally had chosen, and sat like pre-schoolers waiting for story-time. The skies were clear of clouds and the afternoon was warm, but the dappled shade from lemon-scented gum above kept them comfortable in their jeans and shirts. Only Ally wore a dress, a soft, flowing garment in sunflower yellow with matching yellow bandages on her arms.

  ‘I meant to tell everything in chronological order,’ lamented Ally, as she drew her legs up under her, ‘but I think I’ve mentioned things out of order, like Zo’s death, and I’m sorry if it’s confusing.’

  ‘Oh, it’s confusing,’ Sandy teased her, ‘but having the time line slightly out of order is the least of it.’

  Ally found her humour and grinned at her, ‘Hey, kiddo, I saw that David Lynch movie you made. You might want to hold the talk on confusing.’

  A snort of laughter burst out of Sandy at the mention of the mystifying movie that had become a cult hit even though no one seemed to know what it was about. ‘You saw that?’

  ‘Three times,’ Ally gave her a wry look. ‘And I have to say, I remain perplexed.’

  ‘We all do,’ Sandy shook her head. ‘Great special effects, though.’

  ‘And I liked the space ship,’ said Andrew, ‘though I was never completely sure if it was a real space ship or an allegorical one, symbolising their journey through the space between their lives.’

  ‘It sounds great,’ said Marcus without enthusiasm.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Sandy pulled a face at him.

  ‘I want to watch it,’ announced Nick, intrigued by the film he’d never seen. It would be diverting to see the movie while sitting with its star.

  ‘Excellent idea, Nick,’ Ally quirked a teasing eyebrow at Sandy. ‘Movie night at Pete’s place. I’m sure I can talk Gina into letting me go. We can watch the most confusing movie of all time, starring our very own Sandy, and, to embarrass her even further, I think we should watch at least one of her Oscar winning performances.’

  Sandy replied with a roll of her eyes. She knew that when Ally had that mischievous look on her face, there was no point arguing - she was going to have her own way. So, movie night it would be, and Sandy would have to suffer seeing herself on screen, something she always found slightly bizarre.

  ‘Now, if everyone’s comfortable,’ Ally looked around at them, ‘I’ll rush through this as I want to finish with Florence tomorrow, so you can all get back to your lives. I’m thinking straighter than yesterday, and far more so than the day before, so I realise what you’ve all given up to be here. I appreciate that you dropped everything and put your lives on hold for me.’

  She held up a hand to hush their murmured denials of it being a nuisance, ‘I have been a bother, but that’s fine with me. It’s about time I bothered you. Now, let’s hop back to 1478.’

  Closing her eyes, she gathered her memories so that she could speak of the events in a clear manner and not descend into the emotions that overwhelmed Elli so long ago.

  ‘Zo was
not yet thirty. He was comfortably married to Clarice, who was busy having his children. In April of that year, she was coping with their three-month-old baby, Contessina Antonia, their sixth living child. Mind you, unlike most wealthy fathers of the time, Zo loved spending time with his children. Some of his friends seemed quite taken aback by how he enjoyed playing with his own children, but that was him – brilliant, powerful, trying to maintain a balance of peace across Italy, and yet capable of sitting with his children playing nursery games. He just had so much love for everything and everyone, from all of Italy to his children, from his horses to his friends, from his sports to his songs.’

  Her eyes shone brightly as she spoke of him, and each time she described the Florentine man, her audience fell further under his spell.

  ‘Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano ran Florence. There were other powerful families, mind you, but Lorenzo had won over the hearts of the Florentine people with his generosity and his good nature. He may not have been the most handsome of men, even I admit that, but he had such a presence to him. And charm – he could charm the stars from the heavens. Whether he was speaking to a warmonger from another country, a sixty-year-old grandmother, or a six-year-old child, he made them feel special, and they adored him. Giuliano was the pin-up boy of Florence – the Chris Hemsworth of his day. Together they made a formidable team. They were powerful bankers and leaders, but they had enemies.

  ‘Unfortunately, one of those enemies was Pope Sixtus IV. We didn’t like him, though that’s probably understating it a fair bit. I always had an issue with the corrupt nature of the Church, and he was more corrupt than most. He’d made it to the top in the religious business, and religion trumped everything else at the time, so we had to appease him. The Church was the biggest business of them all. Pope Sixtus knew that, and he surrounded himself with family members and friends – nepotism at its finest – in order to keep control.

  ‘Lorenzo tried to stay in the good books with Pope Sixtus, as it was the sensible thing to do, but for all the niceties on the surface, they despised each other. When Sixtus started doing up the Sistine Chapel, beginning the year before the Pazzi plot, Zo encouraged his friends, the artists Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli, to work for Sixtus. It was a good move as, until they finished in 1483, they were Johnny-on-the-spot in Rome for Zo, and sent back a lot of inside information.’

  ‘Are you saying,’ Nick broke in, his expression incredulous, ‘that those famous artists were spies?’

  Ally chuckled, ‘In fifteenth century Italy, everyone spied on everyone else and passed the information along to their family, friends, or favoured man of power. It was a part of life with the influential families of Italy – all the other countries, too. We had spies around us, as well, but only two made it through to our inner circle. One was young Pico - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – he fooled all of us, and we paid dearly for not realising what he was doing. He was nine years my junior and had a brilliant mind, but I kick myself for not seeing him for a religious extremist who would ultimately side with Savonarola – the reviled Giro from my childhood – over an enlightened and forward-thinking person like Zo. I’ll come back to Pico and Giro.’

  ‘You have quite a few threads to come back to,’ Lynette said dryly, wondering if she would remember them all.

  ‘I know,’ Ally winked at her, ‘but I’ll tie off all the loose threads before I finish. Pico isn’t that important, except to prove that Elli could commit murder and not feel a twinge of conscience.’

  Several of the listeners jerked in surprise, but Ally waved their questions away, ‘I’ll come back to that, I promise. And I probably should point out that Pico was important in other ways – he wrote the 900 Theses and founded the Christian Kabbalah movement which, ultimately, led to things like the later occult movements, so even Frankenstein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, probably owe themselves to Pico, which just goes to show how everything has an influence on everything else. But he was an ungrateful extremist and, even though Lorenzo saved his life several times and became his patron, he betrayed us. Zo never stopped caring for him, though.

  ‘Betrayal was a part of life. Other friends and business associates turned on the Medici family when Pope Sixtus and the Pazzi family, who were rival bankers in Florence, worked together on a plan to murder both Lorenzo and Giuliano. Even the best of our spies did not have the details. We knew something was going down, but we didn’t have the times or the details. Zo had extra security around the family, including me, and he had a policy of not appearing in public with Giuliano so that if his enemies attempted an assassination, it was likely one of them would live to control Florence and exact revenge. The conspirators caught them off-guard on that Easter Sunday of 1478 because the mongrels picked one of the few places that we never expected the Pope’s people to commit murder.’

  Her voice faltered and she stopped, gritting her teeth, forcing down the emotions from that day and from the bloody aftermath. While she didn’t have to talk about it, she could control her feelings, but putting the events into words also released the emotions, and it was a struggle to keep her tears inside. There were tears of grief and of rage, of helplessness and devastation. But this was the time to talk, not cry, so she bit the inside of her mouth to have a physical pain that would help keep the tears at bay.

  ‘To try and compress an entire lifetime of information and intrigue into a minute, the Pazzi family and the Salviati family, who were the Papal bankers in Florence, wanted to remove the Medici family from their position as the unofficial heads of Florence. Keep in mind, that although Lorenzo was a bit of a despot, the Florentines loved him because he threw fabulous parties and festivals. He helped people, he was loud in his love of Florence, and he kept staple foods like bread at affordable prices. He knew how to charm his citizens. That was something else his banker rivals hated about him – they believed power came from force, not from being liked. Lorenzo combined his popularity with force, and the people loved him.

  ‘Pope Sixtus wanted another of his nephews, Giovanni della Rovere, to start a new Papal state on the trade routes between Florence and Venice, so he needed Papal control of Florence. He chose yet another nephew, Girolamo Riaro, to take control of Florence once they killed Zo and his brother. Even though the Pazzi family promised Zo that they would not work with Pope Sixtus, they bankrolled Sixtus and secretly plotted with his nephew-slash-son, Girolamo, as well as the Salviatis, and others, to assassinate Zo and Giuliano.

  ‘It was a huge plan, so much more than merely killing the two Medici men. Even Federico da Montefeltro, that one-eyed military genius who had once been loyal to Florence, had joined with Sixtus. Personally, I felt Federico had a greater role in the conspiracy than generally believed, as I’m sure it was his military mind behind much of the planning, but we didn’t find proof. Federico’s daughter had been married to that nephew-slash-son of Pope Sixtus, Giovanni della Rovere, and, as a result of that, Federico became the Duke of Urbino.

  ‘We later learned that Federico waited outside Florence that day with six hundred of his best fighters to take over the city for the Pope, the Pazzi family, and their cronies. He had to be more than a bit-player. He died four years later.’ A chilling smile touched Ally’s mouth. ‘He died of a fever in my home town of Ferrara, shortly after I visited him. He should not have had his troops outside Florence that day.’

  ***

  On that Sunday, in late April, 1478, Elli reluctantly released Zo from her arms as he arose from the pillows to sit on the edge of the bed. At twenty-four, she was a remarkable beauty, even with her hair cropped in a boys’ style. It surprised her that more people didn’t question the identity, or even the age, of the boy who was often with Lorenzo, but perhaps a page or assistant was so far beneath their social standing that they honestly didn’t realise she was the same boy with him, year after year, for almost a decade. Maybe they thought he had a penchant for feminine blonde boys and kept replacing the last one with a look-a
like.

  The thought amused her and she smiled. Zo sat on the edge of the bed and stretched, leaving her to admire how the notches of his spine ran up between the powerful muscles of his shoulders. She reached a hand out and ran fingernails lightly down his spine. He shivered, and turned his head to smile down at her, his eyes warm.

  Meeting his dark brown eyes with her lavender gaze, it was her turn to shiver. In every waking moment, she was aware of the love between them that anchored her to life, and to him. There were times when she’d look up and find him watching her, a protective warmth in his eyes, but there was never a controlling or possessive taint to his gaze. He told her that if she ever wished to leave, he cared so much for her happiness that he would make sure that she would be comfortable for all her days. He would never stop wanting her, he said, but he loved her so much that it was her happiness that was paramount, not his. Of course, she never wanted to leave – her main wish was for every second with him to stretch to eternity.

  Unlike most men she’d known through childhood, he didn’t try to steal power from others by dominating them, he strove to empower those around him, including Elli. Life with him gave her so much freedom compared to other women of her generation. Where their full length, tightly waisted gowns limited their movements, she was able to ride horses or stride down the street alone, wearing a tunic over tights, clothes that allowed her to run, jump, and climb when she wished. She could ride beside Zo and his friends as they hunted, careering at a gallop over the countryside, and if they had to dismount and run on foot to chase their quarry, she ran with them. It was a glorious existence.

  And on that Sunday morning, she awoke in his arms, and had the exquisite joy of trailing her fingers across the bare skin of his back.

  ‘I will not get to mass if you continue,’ his voice was husky with desire.