The Orphan of Florence

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  Do you hate me still, Niccolo? asked the second wistfully, and the former choked before answering,

  You know I love you, old man.

  And I woke up in a fine cozy bed, my gaze by chance focused on the half raised wooden shutter covering the window and the bright afternoon light shining through beneath. It hurt my eyes a bit and made me realize I had a headache. It also confused me, because I’d thought the sun had already set. The room was unfamiliar, airier than those in the Medici Palazzo because the walls were plain whitewashed stucco, without the busy wooden panels, and less cluttered, with only a few oil paintings on the walls and not a single priceless curio.

  I wasn’t dead—the headache was proof enough of that—but I was someplace I’d never been before. Not in Florence, nor any other city because it was so profoundly quiet. I was so used to the clanging of church bells and nonstop clatter of wheels and hooves, the chatter of pedestrians and songs of merchants that the absence of them all was remarkable.

  The light streaming through the window made me direct my gaze downward, where a large gray dog with a coat like close-cropped velvet was dozing, his great square muzzle resting on his forepaws, his pendulous jowls fanning out onto the tile floor.

  “Leo,” I croaked with joy.

  Leo drew his head up with a start, his pale eyes ferally alert. At the sight of my face, his stub of a tail began to thump wildly, and he grinned so fetchingly I gave a soft laugh, even though the effort made the throbbing in my temple worse. He pushed himself to his feet, his nails clicking against rustic tile, and began dancing in place, looking over his shoulder at the man sitting on the daybed pushed against the wall beneath the window. Leo clearly wanted to jump up on the bed with me, but either needed permission or feared rebuke.

  Like the dog, the man on the daybed woke with a start, and closed his half agape mouth. His bare head and cheeks caught the daylight, revealing the very beginnings of silvery stubble.

  “Giuliana,” Abramo said. The sound held concern and hope edged with shame. He seemed not to see the mastiff vying frantically for his attention.

  “You’re real,” I rasped. Just like laughing, talking hurt. For some reason, my throat was terribly sore.

  “I’m sorry that we had to fool you,” he said, and whatever he said next, I didn’t hear, because I started to cry. Not so much out of relief, although there was definitely some of that, but out of rage and grief over my needless suffering.

  “I thought you trusted me,” I wept. “Why didn’t you just take me with you? Why did you have to be so cruel?”

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his expression stricken, puzzled. “I didn’t think … I didn’t know … that you would care that much.” He cleared his throat. “But when you knelt over me when you thought I was dying, when you whispered to me, I wanted so badly to tell you then. But of course, they would have killed us both.” He drew in a breath. “I thought—I thought that you were playing along with me. For the money.”

  True, of course, not that I was going to admit to it.

  “Is it even true?” I asked, sniffling, wiping my tears on the edge of a woolen sleeve of a lady’s fine nightgown that I’d never seen before. “That you’re my father? Or was that a trick, too?”

  He stood up, walked to the edge of the bed, and sat down beside me. Leo followed, pressing against his thighs.

  “I’m your father, Giuliana,” he said gently, and took up my hand between his. “What I told you was the truth.”

  “Why’d you even tell me, then, if you knew you were going to be dead?”

  He lowered his gaze, sorrowful in the face of my pain. “I was hoping it would make you care. I was hoping it would make you seek out the Medici for answers, so they could take care of you.”

  I hiccupped, the way Tommaso sometimes does after a long cry. “You really are my father?” My voice sounded so small and wistful, just like Tommaso’s, and it wasn’t even an act.

  “I really am,” he said, in his deep beautiful voice, and he brought my hand, clasped between his own, to his lips and kissed it.

  I cried. I cried the way Tommaso used to, mouth open and contorted, eyes and nose streaming as I let go ugly hitching sounds. I pressed my sore, aching cheek against Ser Abramo’s shoulder and let him hold me, let him pat my back and murmur to me until I couldn’t cry anymore. Leo panted happily beside us, pawing at me from time to time.

  “It’s magic,” Abramo said solemnly, holding me. “Magic that you are here. Magic that we are here together.”

  “The notes you left me,” I said, my words partly muffled by his damp shoulder. “In the magical tent, on the altar. How did you do that? The tunnel beneath the carpet, right? It must lead up to the hidden chamber where I found the cipher wheel. You must have been at the house when I was working on the talismans. You must have … you must have heard me talking to you when I was in the tent somehow.”

  He shook his head. “That was real magic, Giuliana.”

  There was not the slightest shift in his posture, his tone. He seemed as utterly serious as when he’d confirmed he was my father. Even so, I let go a feeble snicker, to which he failed to react, and pulled gently out of the embrace, leaving us to study each other at close range.

  “My mother,” I ventured. “Is she dead?”

  He held very still, and paused for so long that I needed no further answer.

  “She’s alive,” I said, marveling, indignant. “Who is she? Where is she? Is she—”

  He cut me off. “It’s not my choice to tell you. It’s hers. The note explained that it’s not my place to speak of it. She is a woman of uncommon reputation and importance and I will never do anything to see her or her loved ones hurt.”

  I pressed a hand to my aching head and began to cry again, out of frustration but oddly, not a desire to influence.

  Abramo’s expression was one of helplessness. “It’s out of my hands. Just know that you are loved, by both of us.” He wrapped his arms around me and held me to him briefly, then rose and paused at the door.

  “I’ll send someone with food. In the meantime, you need to rest. You’ve gone through more than any young woman should ever have to.”

  He took a final glance at me and left, Leo ever by his side, while I was still crying bitterly.

  * * *

  Eventually I cried myself back to sleep until the sound of a door opening woke me. The sun had set again, and the candle lamp on the table beside my bed had been lit without my knowing it. The half open shutter revealed a full moon, which cast a silvery pane of light across the floor and the center of my bed.

  I didn’t pay much mind to the woman who carried the tray of food in and set it carefully down on the bedside table—not until she bent down and her face entered the pane of bluish incandescence, making her weathered face look magical. The veil over her gray hair was pure colorless gossamer that caught the moonlight like a halo. At that moment, she looked more ghostly than any apparition I’d seen of Ser Abramo in my delirium.

  Donna Lucrezia’s face passed from the silvered light into warm candleglow, and became warm, human, wistfully aged. There were pockets of slack flesh beneath her dark, impossibly intelligent eyes, and purplish shadows, and lines bracing her mouth, its edges curved ever so slightly upward and trembling.

  She sat down on the daybed where Abramo had so recently been and folded her hands in her lap. She wore a housewife’s simple apron and a dress as simple as any servant’s. She did not look like the matriarch of the powerful Medici family or the brilliant architect behind the cipher wheel. She looked timid and small.

  Yet there was no denying the infinite love in her eyes as she stretched her hand out to my cheek and said, her voice unsteady with maternal emotion: “My Giuliana. Oh, my Giuliana…”

  I asked her no questions, demanded no confessions. Whatever shame and grief she had felt over the past two decades had certainly been enough. I simply pushed myself up to sitting and swung my legs over the bed and reached for her, re
ached across all those years of pain and misunderstanding.

  Before we embraced she paused to draw something gleaming from her apron pocket: a talisman, a silver one, just like the one from my childhood. For the second time in my life, she lifted it over my head and settled the charm gently so that it came to rest over my heart.

  * * *

  Despite the emotional encounter, when my mother left the room, I discovered that I was ravenous, and I made short shrift of the supper of bread, cheese, and soup. I left not a crumb of bread or cheese, licked the bowl clean, and drank sufficient wine to become a bit tipsy. As I’d had more than enough sleep, I decided to explore my surroundings. I slipped out from beneath the covers and discovered a shawl thoughtfully placed on the nightstand so that I could maintain decency.

  I made my way through a series of rooms—a library, an office, a guestchamber—all of them containing at least one bed, just like the Medici Palazzo in town. The shutters were closed, but the light outlined their edges brightly enough that I could make my way surely. I eventually came to a large sitting area for entertaining crowds. Despite the cold, someone had raised a shutter to reveal the dazzling moon, partially blocked by the dark silhouette of a man. He stood with his back to me, staring up at the dazzling moon.

  “Niccolo,” I said, my tone hushed.

  Startled, he drew in a breath and turned, his wide green eyes rendered pale gray in the light.

  “You’re up,” he responded quietly. “How do you feel?” His expression was more vulnerable, gentler, than I’d ever seen it. He stepped from the window toward me, his movements stiff after the previous day’s battles. The outline of a bandage over his abdomen was clearly visible beneath his silk tunic.

  I moved to stand beside him, ignoring the throbbing in my head and the ache that consumed my entire body.

  “I’m fine,” I murmured dismissively and paused. “Thank you for saving my life. I take it Ser Lorenzo is well?”

  He nodded. “On his way to his destination.” He paused. “No need to thank me. I would have had to fight those men sooner or later. I may have saved your fingers, but it was you who saved my life, if you recall.”

  I gestured with my chin at his half hidden bandage. “And left you with a memento. Actually, I wasn’t thanking you for that—I was thanking you for teaching me the leg trick. It saved my neck.”

  He frowned, puzzled. “Leg trick?”

  I moved in even closer, and twined a leg around his to remind him of the maneuver.

  “Oh. Yes,” he said, staring directly into my eyes in a fashion I might have found unsettling had I not been doing the same to him. His breathing and mine had grown more rapid. Instead of stepping back, I kept my leg pressed against his and put my arms around his thick chest at the same instant that he wound his arms around my shoulders. I gave a small, sharp gasp as his hands found the burn left by Stout’s pincers, but he took it for passion and pressed his lips to mine. His were incredibly soft and smelled of good wine.

  My head throbbed, and the kiss reminded me of how bruised and sore my lips were. Yet I cared not one whit. A blaze was kindled in my core and radiated outward until it contained me, until it contained both of us. We stayed enmeshed for a timeless moment, until I felt the kindling of an internal blaze and myself melting, until my body was possessed of an entirely different sort of ache.

  I pulled gently away from him. “Not here,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “Everyone is asleep.” He gestured at the wing opposite the one I’d come from.

  I stared in disbelief for a moment. It was uncommon for a young unmarried woman like myself to be sleeping alone, without a servant or chaperone within hearing. It was almost as if Donna Lucrezia and Ser Abramo had known that this moment would come and were giving tacit approval.

  I offered him my hand, and he took it, and let me lead him back to my bedchamber with its whitewashed walls. As I closed the door behind us, he hesitated.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.”

  “But we haven’t even…” He hesitated, suddenly endearingly shy. “I’ve only kissed you the once now, not even properly. And I haven’t even asked for your hand.”

  I laughed with something suspiciously akin to joy. “I know just the man you should speak to about that,” I said, and he grinned and reached for me.

  But another thought stopped him. “I’m not at my best,” he said wryly, and lifted up his tunic to show the bandage on his abdomen.

  “You mean you can’t—”

  “I didn’t say that,” he countered. “It’s just that … I want you to know that…”

  “That you’ll do better next time?” I grinned.

  He grinned back and said teasingly, “And you and your head. Your poor face is quite bruised, you know.”

  “I’ll look better next time,” I quipped. “In the meantime, you’d better kiss it. A proper kiss, now.”

  He leaned down and obeyed, taking me into his arms, wincing only a little when I pressed myself against him—my waist straining against his wound, my breasts against his hard ribs, my face upturned, a flower seeking the sun. He put his lips tenderly to mine. His clothes smelled of horses, his face and neck of rosemary and soap. He hadn’t shaved, and the stubble on his cheeks pricked my skin, but even that discomfort was a delight. His wiry goatee brushed my chin and, despite myself, I giggled, my lips still against his, and felt my own warm breath on my cheeks. He playfully caught hold of my lower lip ever so softly with his teeth before letting go.

  “It tickles,” I mumbled. I could feel the bright flush on my face, my body, could hear my own quickened breathing. Stranger still was the sensation of pure happiness.

  “Would you mind very much,” he began, and stopped.

  I drew back, our noses less than a hand’s breadth apart. “Yes,” I said.

  He laughed quietly. “I haven’t even told you what I wanted.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The answer is still the same.”

  I felt a thrill at my own bold words, one of yearning mixed with a distinct undercurrent of fear. I looked at his eyes, pale gray ringed with charcoal in the silvered light, and realized: He was all too mortal, in a dangerous profession, and if I allowed that I loved him, would God then conspire to take him from me?

  Perhaps. But perhaps not. He had restored my mother and father and spared Tomasso, Celia, Niccolo, and me from the direst situation. Perhaps even Lorenzo and Florence would survive.

  I glanced sidewise at the moon, half hidden by the shutters, and felt a pang of sorrow for Paolo and Old Sot before turning back to Niccolo.

  He was smiling. “Then would you mind terribly if I removed your nightgown?”

  It was unsettling to want someone so badly, but I drew in a breath and braved it. Niccolo was here, now, and so was I, and I was determined to experience the bliss of this moment, no matter what came next.

  “Please,” I said. I let the shawl slip from my shoulders onto the floor.

  His fingers were unsteady as he gently gathered the woolen fabric into his hands and awkwardly lifted it up over my head. It took a bit of struggling on both our parts to free me of the long sleeves.

  The nightgown dropped silently into a small heap. I wore nothing beneath. I stepped out of the pool of fabric and kicked it away with decided irreverence.

  By then, he had removed his tunic and the plain camicia beneath. His shoulders were broad and beautifully sculpted, tapering down to a deliciously small waist. A thicket of dark hair covered his chest from his nipples and thinned to a vee above his navel. The moon painted his skin bluish white.

  I reached for him at the same time he reached for my breast. We both froze in unison, our hands wavering in midair.

  “May I?” he asked again.

  “If I asked the same of you, what would you say?” I countered, impatient.

  He chuckled. “I’d tell you to stop asking silly questions.”

>   I raised my eyebrows to say, Well, then …

  Sheepish, he half smiled. “It’s just that…” I couldn’t see him blush in the light, but I could hear it in his tone. “When I first met you, I thought you were a boy. And I’d never been attracted to a boy that way before. I began to wonder what was happening to me. And then when I touched—that is, when I realized you were a young woman…”

  I stared up at his beautiful face, utterly charmed by his words, not quite able to believe that someone I’d loved from afar—so far, in fact, that I hadn’t fully admitted to myself until that instant—actually returned my feelings.

  “Will you lie down?” he asked.

  I would. And when I settled my naked body down into the pane of blue light that fell across the bed, he removed his leggings and lay down beside me. Propped on one elbow, he ran his hand over my flesh, over my breasts, down to the mound between my legs. I sighed and pulled him down on top of me.

  “Is this…?” Niccolo began; once again I didn’t let him finish.

  I nodded. “My first time.”

  I reached between us and found that part of him that was impossibly firm yet velvet to the touch and guided him.

  When he entered me, I gasped—not with pain or discomfort, but pure amazement that I had lived long enough to feel such pleasure, such happiness.

  As he moved inside me, and our bodies began to rock together in that most primal of rhythms, I stared past him at the glorious moon.

  Even now, when the moon shines I remember poor Paolo and Old Sot and embrace the sorrow I dared not feel before. But I no longer see only their suffering. I see Niccolo’s face, contorted by passion. I see beauty, too, and love, and magic.

  * * *

  They make me dress like a woman now. I hate it. I’m used to wearing the camicia, the long undershirt, because everybody does, but the women’s are longer, and they wear an underskirt, too, and over that is the gamurra, the gown proper, but that doesn’t include the overgown or the sleeves, or any one of the hundred possible additions to the layers and layers, which all end in the ubiquitous mantello, draped in a hundred possible ever-so-stylish ways. Don’t even get me started on the headpieces. If I go out at all, even if it’s just to the chapel, Donna Lucrezia insists I wear a wig. It’s a fine one, done up in coils and braids, which are the fashion now, but I call it the rat, in part because it makes Celia laugh when I do. I wear a veil over it, of course, and look so terribly convincingly female that when I first appeared in it, Tommaso didn’t recognize me for a full minute.