The Orphan of Florence

by Jeanne Kalogridis

“A florin?” Tommaso’s piping voice took on a scornful tone. “Giuliano, you’re teasing!”

  “You are teasing,” Cecilia said, but it was as much a question as a statement. She stopped jiggling Ginevra, who popped a thumb into her drooling mouth. “What sort of job could possibly pay a florin, unless you own a bank?”

  A very good question, one I still didn’t have an explanation for. But I did my best to look confident, for Cecilia’s sake.

  “Like I said, he’s rich as a Medici. Take a whiff, Cecilia. I took a warm bath with perfumed soap last night.” I extended my neck in her direction. She leaned forward to sniff it.

  “You do smell wonderful,” she admitted. Her voice grew soft, and her expression suspicious—not in a disapproving way, but a protective one. “So you weren’t in a police office last night, were you? What exactly would you have to do for this man, Giuli?”

  We both knew what she was referring to, although Tommaso hadn’t a clue. We never talked about Cecilia’s former profession in front of him.

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “He’s a very nice man. And he needs a … courier. It’s very busy work and requires good knowledge of the city.” I drew in a breath, and released it with another half truth. “He knows about you three, and he’s very generous to the poor. He wants to help us start a new life. He’s a saint, really.”

  Cecilia set the baby down on the bed and sat down heavily beside her. “It’s too good to be true.”

  I grinned. “Yes, it’s too good to be true, but it really is.”

  For emphasis, I took the gold florin Ser Abramo had given me and pressed it into her palm. She sucked in air with a short, high-pitched shriek, as if the pope himself had just walked into the room. Tommaso ran to her side, crowding her as he tried to get a good look.

  She stared at it, her eyes very wide. And because she still couldn’t quite believe it, she sank her teeth into it and started when she saw that they had made a slight impression in the soft gold. When she could finally speak, she asked, still gazing down at the coin, “How soon can we start looking for a house?”

  “Tomorrow, I think,” I said. “Around this same time. But I’ll need to check with my employer first.”

  She looked up at me, her gaze bright with affection. “All of us together in a house. Like a real family. Giuli, you’re so amazing!”

  “Really?” Tommaso looked up at me with a not-so-toothy grin. “A real house?”

  I cleared my throat and gave a little shrug, trying to sound casual. “Yes, all of us together. It’ll be wonderful. I’ll just be spending the night at Ser Giovanni’s place for a little while, but I’ll come by every day.”

  “You mean you’ll be staying there?” Cecilia asked.

  “You’re not going to stay with me?” Tommaso echoed immediately. His voice sounded very, very small.

  “Not in the beginning,” I answered briskly. “I’ll be busy earning a lot of money so we’ll all be rich. I can’t help it, Tommaso. You know I’d stay if I could. But I’ll see you as often as I can. Things will be just the same, except that we won’t have to play the Game anymore. Cecilia and Ginevra will keep you company at night.”

  Tommaso was smart, like me, and wasn’t fooled for an instant. His eyes filled and his pale, freckled face contorted, the lips drawing up in a grimace to reveal the red-pink gap where his front tooth had been.

  “You’re leaving me,” he said. His voice shook. “You’re moving in with a rich man, and you’re leaving me with Cecilia.”

  He threw himself facedown on the bed and began to wail, heartbroken, his butterfly-wing shoulder blades shuddering. Baby Ginevra joined in.

  “No, no, no,” I said sternly. “Don’t say that, Tommaso. I promised I wouldn’t leave you and I keep my promises.”

  I went over to the bed and tried to get him to roll over; he did, but buried his head in his arms to try to hide the fact that his face was red and dripping with tears. He can produce an amazing amount of them in a very short time.

  “I’m only doing it long enough so we can afford a nice house,” I said. “I won’t be gone forever. I’ll try to take you and Cecilia to look for one tomorrow.”

  “That’ll be fun, won’t it, Tommaso?” Cecilia ventured brightly. “A house where we can live together forever!” To me, she whispered, “He really took it very hard last night when you didn’t show.”

  Tommaso was beside himself sobbing. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me,” he gasped. “You promised, Giuliano.”

  “Tommaso, no,” I said, and put my hand on his shoulder. He flailed out blindly, one arm covering his eyes, the hand of the other slapping the air around me—a symbolic gesture, nothing more. He didn’t mean to hit me, but I leaned in too close, and the edge of his sharp little fingernails broke the skin at my cheekbone.

  “My mother said she’d never leave me, too,” he wept.

  “Tommaso!” Cecilia cautioned. “Don’t you dare strike Giuli ever again, or I’ll give you a whipping! You’re just going to have to spend the nights with Ginevra and me for a little while longer. You’re a big boy, so quit acting like a baby.”

  Cecilia’d been out working the streets the first week I stayed with Tommaso. She didn’t know that his mother had died of plague in the night, that he had stumbled, terrified, over her body. She hadn’t been with me when Tommaso woke screaming from nightmares, and later trembled in my arms. She didn’t know just how horribly afraid he’d been of the dark, until the only way to get him to sleep was to swear that I’d never leave him.

  But letting myself get choked up about it wasn’t going to help any of us.

  “He’ll come around,” Cecilia said softly to me.

  “Tommaso,” I said urgently.

  He stopped weeping in order to listen.

  “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I don’t want you to,” he said coldly, his words muffled by the mattress. “I can’t believe you anymore.”

  Cecilia lowered her voice. “Tomorrow will be a different story, Giuli. I’ll make him apologize to you.” She unfolded her fist to look at the gold in her palm again. “I can’t really believe it,” she said, looking up at me and smiling. “Giuli, a house! You’re so amazing! How can I ever repay you?”

  “You already paid,” I said listlessly, and headed for the door.

  Cecilia opened it for me. “We should be celebrating,” she said. “I just pray that whatever you’re doing, it’s nothing terribly dangerous. That you don’t get hurt. Then we would all have reason to cry.”

  “I won’t get hurt,” I said. “I’ll try to come back tomorrow.”

  Before I could turn to leave, she whispered, “You have to tell me, Giuli. What sort of job requires you to spend the night with your employer?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m to be his courier.”

  “Of what?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. At last I said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I left her standing in the doorway as I went back down the stairs and headed into the streets, telling myself firmly that I did not feel like crying for Tommaso. No one, I thought, could ever make me cry.

  I would soon be proven wrong.

  Five

  I made my way south through the city, past the Duomo and the more distant toothy tower of the Signoria, and over the Old Bridge, so preoccupied with Tommaso’s reaction that I saw little of it and barely heard the indignant comments of the passersby I nearly collided with. I had to figure out a way to reassure him, or he’d be hell to live with from here on out.

  I moved off the bridge and passed under the arched stone portal onto the cobblestone street—the broadest street in all Florence, the Via Maggio—separated from the river by built up banks and a low stone wall meant to hold back the floods to which the Arno was prone. The Duomo’s midday bells began to chime as if cued and were joined by a hundred different bells from a hundred lesser churches all over Florence, including th
e near-deafening ones of the nearby cathedral of Santo Spirito.

  I squinted in the bright winter sun, standing still as a tide of purposeful pedestrians swept by on the busy street, including a group of Franciscan monks near running as they hurried to Santo Spirito for noon Mass. I was surprised that Ser Abramo wasn’t already waiting for me just beyond the gate. I’d expected him to be prompt.

  Just as I was debating whether I’d misunderstood his message, a hand gripped my shoulder from behind. I let go a yelp of surprise and wheeled about.

  An elderly Franciscan stood before me, a finger raised to his lips. His brown hood covered a fringe of black-and-silver hair, chopped so that it just covered the tips of his ears. His shaved crown was covered by a little brown skullcap, and his face was lean and stubbly, with a markedly prominent nose, its tip reddened by the cold.

  “Giuliano,” Ser Abramo said softly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  * * *

  Still disguised, Ser Abramo lead me on a circuitous path beyond the cobblestone streets of the Oltrarno, into the thick of the woods and back out again, pointing out landmarks that weren’t at all obvious to the uninitiated eye. He, too, was preoccupied and spoke the fewest words possible. We covered a good bit of ground before he came out of his reverie.

  “That oak trunk there,” he finally said, pointing. “Orient yourself to the southeast, on a diagonal and keep walking until you come upon the remnants of an abandoned well. Then proceed due east from there until you come upon the mole-pocked field; in spring and summer, it’ll be a meadow, but you’ll know from the holes.”

  He indicated other landmarks, too, a poplar tree in the middle of a copse of oaks, a barn visible in the far distance, and a pond. I did my best to concentrate, even though my thoughts kept returning to Tommaso. We eventually arrived at the high brick walls of the abandoned estate.

  Each worn stone in the high wall looked the same as the other, and the woody vines covered the top half of the wall as far as I could see. Yet Ser Abramo didn’t hesitate as he drew his necklace of keys out from beneath the brown cassock with one hand; with the other, he pointed at the spot where the lock was hidden beneath the thicket.

  “Right there,” he said. And to prove his point, he lifted the vines and thrust the key right into the lock. I heard it click.

  “But how do you know where?” I asked.

  “Look.” He pointed down at the spot where the wall met the earth, directly beneath the lock. The very bottom stone was cracked vertically in two, right down the middle. If I’d drawn a straight line up from the crack, it would have intersected the lock perfectly.

  He handed me the keys and let me run my hand over the cold stone to find the lock, then stood back as he waited for me to get the door open. The lock was old and rusting, and I had difficulty fitting the key into it. Trying to turn the key was even harder; I jiggled it several different ways without success before trying to use so much force that I finally feared I would break it in two.

  I half turned to Ser Abramo, who was watching me carefully, his expression suddenly sad. I opened my mouth to say, I can’t do it. But I never got the chance.

  The world went black and I couldn’t breathe. The keys crashed to the earth. I clawed at the fabric pulled down over my head, at the large hands that instantly cinched and tied it around my neck.

  “Abramo!” I screamed, muffled. “Abramo, help me!”

  “Gently!” he shouted at someone else. “Gently!”

  I flailed out blindly, lost my balance, and stumbled against a large male body that caught my wrists and held me fast. “You bastard!” I screamed, muffled. “You lying filthy bastard!”

  But the body that pinned me wasn’t Abramo’s, which always smelled of rosemary; this man was stout and stunk of sweat and rancid lard. He pushed me against a likewise foul-smelling cohort, who held me fast as the first bound my wrists together. I was knocked to my feet and managed to connect the heels of my boots against an invisible face. I wasn’t about to let them take me down easily.

  “Abramo! Help me!” I yelled, but there was only silence save for the sound of my struggling and the collision of strange flesh against mine.

  I roared, drowning in rage—at the Magician, at God, at the fact that I would never get to see Tommaso’s front tooth grow back in.

  At the fact that he would always believe I had abandoned him on purpose. That I was disloyal.

  Most of all, I raged at myself: How, how could I ever have been so stupid as to let myself trust anyone?

  I kicked; I howled; I cursed all three men hideously and called for help, but none of it availed. I was pushed and pulled into the woods, into a cart, and set facedown on mounds of soft fabric. More was laid over me, until I was covered and gasping. I turned my head to one side, the better to get air. A man cried hee-yah, a donkey brayed, and the cart lurched forward, creaking and rumbling over uneven earth.

  * * *

  The earth gave way to cobblestone, the rural quiet to the muffled singsong of vendors and babble of pedestrians, the clops of a hundred other hooves, the creaks of a hundred other wagons. We were in the heart of the city proper, but in my disoriented shock, I could not have said where.

  The noise abruptly faded; the cart stopped.

  The tarp was thrown back, the folded piles of fabrics removed, and my ankles unbound. Still blinded, I could walk. My captors flanked me, each clutching one of my arms, and pulled me along with them. From the echo of our steps, I judged we were inside a large open building—and not a fancy one at that. Wooden planks creaked beneath our feet, and a draft of cold air wafted over me; it smelled faintly of sulfur, like the arms of freshly dyed fabric that had covered me in the wagon bed. A warehouse, then.

  We walked a fair ways before we moved into a slightly warmer area. I was pushed down onto a stool. One man pressed his hand firmly down on my shoulder, to keep me seated, while the other pulled a door shut behind us.

  Fingers fussed at my neck; the film of black cloth disappeared as a captor pulled the hood from my head.

  I sat in front of a large wooden desk, once grand but now worn and pitted. On the other side sat one of my abductors, a man so stout his great belly kept him from resting his elbows on the desk. He smiled grimly at me, his clean-shaven cheeks red and puffed from drink; far leaner by comparison, his accomplice stood beside me, motionless, his face still hidden by his cowl, a dagger prominently displayed in the hand that wasn’t holding me down.

  “Don’t be afraid, we’re one of you,” Stout said, as I tried to make sense of his grammar; his accent was that of a Florentine laborer. “Giuseppe sent us.” He paused. “You can trust me, y’know. Giuseppe tol’ me you was all right, that you’d be loyal to our cause. ’Cause you have a head on your shoulders.”

  “Giuseppe?” I asked, confused. I’d never heard of the man.

  “The same,” Stout confirmed. “C’mon, you don’t have to pretend with us. Surely you’ve had some … interaction?”

  I shook my head.

  “Here then,” he said, and made a strange symbol, a sort of t made by raising one hand, palm forward, as if to swear an oath, and laying his opposite hand, palm down, atop it.

  My expression was apparently so perplexed that he took my response as genuine.

  “It don’t matter, then,” he said, folding his hands over his belly. “Even if he din’ speak to you yet, we still have an offer.” He cleared his throat. “So here’s the part about the money, laddie. You knew this were coming, din’ you?”

  “What about the money?” I scowled at him to show I had no fear, but my shaking voice betrayed me.

  Stout grinned at me, revealing a missing front tooth; I thought of Tommaso teasing the pink little gap with his tongue and felt a pang. “You think he were lying about the florins, din’ you?”

  He was speaking of Ser Abramo. The Magician hadn’t defended me; he had set me up. These goons were his.

  “The son of a bitch!” I exclaimed involuntarily.

&
nbsp; “You’re angry at ’im, I get that. So maybe you din’ expect this. But did you think he were lyin’ about the florins?”

  “Probably,” I allowed.

  Stout nodded, pleased at my reply.

  “He’s not,” he said. “You strike me as quick for a lad. Now Florence may be a rich city, but people ain’t so keen to toss a florin at the feet of a little thief like you, eh?” His smile vanished along with his jovial tone. “Florence is dyin’. Starvin’ to death for Lorenzo’s sin. You bit of skin and bone, you look like your belly’s never been full. And now the merchants is coming to know hunger, too. Even the wealthy is feelin’ the pinch.”

  He leaned forward toward me—as far as his corpulence allowed—his gaze intense. “There’s no way our handful of soldiers can win against the likes of Rome and Naples. No way at all, and everyone knows it. Even Lorenzo’s fine fat friends. And what happens when they start hurtin’?”

  I stared back at him, mute.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Stout said confidently. “Revolution. If the pope’s army don’t come in and slaughter you all to a man first.”

  “What do you mean you all?” I asked gruffly. “You’re Florentine, too.”

  “But I ain’t stupid, now, is I?” he countered.

  I didn’t dare reply.

  “And you ain’t stupid neither,” he continued. “We see the writin’ on the wall, you and me. Besides, them as has suffered like you—the poor, the outcast—this life is cruel. But in death you got eternal riches in heaven. It’s all poor folk has to look forward to, innit?

  “But every soul in Florence are excommunicated now, all because of one man’s sin. So you don’t even got that to look forward to. And Lorenzo, he’s got all the money he can spend and then some, so why should he worry with the likes of you?”

  Lorenzo didn’t sin, I wanted to tell him. We were excommunicated because the pope is mad at Lorenzo. Lorenzo wouldn’t sell him the property he wanted, and so Pope Sixtus sent people to murder Lorenzo and his brother. And now Sixtus is punishing all of us Florentines until Lorenzo gives himself up—to be killed.