The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  The prostitutes themselves were careful enough. There were rules as to how they should conduct themselves. The bells they carried and the gloves they wore were the law as well as props of enticement. But again, it was a law gently implemented. As with the Sumptuary Police, there was an accepted difference between the spirit and the letter. Erila was forever coming home with stories about how women accosted by officials for wearing fur or silver buttons argued their way out of a fine by a cunning use of semantics: “Oh no, sir, this is not fur, it is a new material which is only like fur. And these? These are not buttons. There are no buttonholes, see? They are, rather, clips. Clips? Yes, you must have heard of them. Surely Florence is the wonder of the world, to have such new things in it.” But from what one heard, such wit was now lost on certain of the new officers. Purity was coming back into fashion, and the blind eye of authority was getting back its vision.

  I had only seen a courtesan once. The Ponte alle Grazie had been closed with flood damage and we had had to cross at the Ponte Vecchio. It was dusk. Ludovica walked in front of Plautilla and me, with Maria herding in the rear. We passed by an open shop door, a candlemaker’s, I remember, gloomy inside but with a window at the back looking out over the river, the sunset behind it. A woman was sitting in silhouette, her breasts bare, and at her feet a man kneeling with his head between her skirts, as if in worship. She was lovely, her body lit up by the setting sun, and at that moment she turned her head to look out toward the street and I am sure she saw me staring. She smiled and seemed so . . . well, sure of herself. I know that I felt both excited and disturbed and had to look away.

  I wondered later about her palpable beauty. If Plato was right, how could it be possible for a woman of no virtue to have such looks? Filippo Lippi’s mistress had at least been a nun serving God when the call came to be his Madonna. And in a way she still served God afterward, her image calling others to prayer. Oh, she was beautiful! Her face lit up dozens of his paintings: clear-eyed, calm, shouldering her burden with gratitude and grace. I liked her more than Botticelli’s Madonna. Though Fra Filippo had been his teacher he had taken a different model, a woman everyone knew to have been Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress. Once you knew her face you began to see it everywhere: in his nymphs, his angels, his classical heroines, even his saints. Botticelli’s Madonna, you felt, might belong to anyone who looked at her. Fra Filippo’s belonged only to God and herself.

  My stomach stabbed at me again. My mother kept a bottle of digestive liquore in the medicine chest in her dressing room. If I took some now it might ease the pain. I left my room and moved silently down one flight of stairs, but as I turned toward my mother’s quarters I was drawn to something else, a flickering line of light coming from under the door of the chapel room to my left. The chapel was out of bounds to servants, and with my mother and father gone there was only one person it could be. I can no longer remember if that thought halted or spurred me on.

  INSIDE, A FLICKERING WAVE OF CANDLELIGHT ILLUMINATES THE apse, but immediately the light contracts, then eclipses altogether as the last candle is capped. I wait, then close the door behind me, deliberately letting its hinges moan, before letting it slam noisily shut. Whoever I am, as far as he is concerned I have left again.

  For the longest time we stand in the dark, the silence so raw that when I swallow I can hear the sound of my saliva inside my ears. Finally, a pinprick of light appears where the candles had been. I watch as the concealed taper fires one wick, then another and another, until the apse is awash with tongues of orange and he comes into focus, his tall lanky body revealed inside the semicircle of light.

  I take the first steps toward him. My feet are bare and I am practiced at night walking. But so, it seems, is he. His head lifts sharply, like an animal reading a night scent. “Who’s there?” And his voice is harsh enough to do damage to my heartbeat, though I know it comes from fear rather than anger.

  I walk to the edge of the light. The glow of the candles throws shadows onto his face and his eyes glint, a true cat in the dark. We are neither of us dressed for company. He has no tunic on and his undershirt is open so I can see the ridge of his collarbone and the smooth bare flesh beneath, pearl-shiny in the candlelight. I am a frozen gawky figure in a crumpled chemise, my hair unbraided down my back. That same yeasty smell about him that I remember from our portrait sitting is heavy in the air around us. Except now I know where it comes from. What did my brother call it, the stink of cheap cunt? But if Erila is right, how could a man so frightened of women be so drawn? What if he is come here to confess?

  “I saw the candlelight from the corridor. What are you doing?”

  “I am working,” he says gruffly.

  Now, behind him, I can see the cartone stuck to the east wall of the apse, a full-sized drawing of the fresco with the outline pricked out so it can be transferred to the wall in charcoal. The art of fresco: what I know so much about in theory he is now familiar with in fact. His new knowledge makes me want to cry. I know I should not be here. Whether he is profligate or not, if we were to be found together now both our lives would be torn apart. But my hunger and my curiosity override my fear, and I move past him to read the drawing better.

  I can still see it now: the glory of Florence conjured up in a hundred deft pen strokes. In the foreground, two groups of people are gathered on each side, staring down at a stretcher on the floor on which a girl’s body is laid. They are marvelous, these spectators: flesh-and-blood men and women of the city, their characters captured in their faces—age, kindness, serenity, or stubbornness in turn. His ethereal pen has come down to earth. But his journey is most noticeable in the girl. She draws your eye in immediately, not just because she is the focal point in the composition but because of her intense fragility. With Tomaso’s obscenities buzzing in my head, I cannot help but wonder where he has found the model. Perhaps he only seeks them out to paint them. Were there really prostitutes so young? That she is a girl rather than a woman is obvious; under her night shift you can feel her breasts budding and there is a clumsy angularity about her frame, as if womanhood is coming too soon. But the singular most arresting thing about her body is its complete lifelessness.

  “Oh!” I am speaking before I have given myself permission. “You have learned a lot in our city. How do you do that? How is it I know she is dead? When I look at her it seems so clear. But which are the lines that tell me that? Show me. Whenever I draw bodies, I can’t distinguish sleep from death. Many times they just look awake with their eyes closed.”

  So there. It is out at last. I wait for him to laugh in my face or show his contempt in a million other ways. The silence grows and I am as scared as when we were both in the dark.

  “I should tell you that this is not a confession in the face of God, sir, since He already knows,” I say quietly. “But it is a confession in front of you. So perhaps you might say something?”

  I look past him into the gloom of the chapel. It is as good a place as any. Its walls will surely hear worse in years to come.

  “You draw?” he says softly.

  “Yes. Yes! But I want to do more. I want to paint. As you do.” Suddenly it seems as if it is the most important thing in the world to tell him. “Is that so terrible? If I were a boy and had talent, I would already be apprenticed to a master—just as you have been. Then I too would know how to light up these walls with paint. But instead I am stuck in this house while my parents look for a husband for me. Eventually they will buy one with a good name and I will go to his house, run his household, have his children, and disappear into the fabric of his life like a pale thread of color in a tapestry. Meanwhile the city will be full of artists constructing glories to God, and I shall never know if I could have done the same. Even though I don’t have your talent, painter, I have your desire. You have to help me. Please.”

  And I know he has understood. He does not laugh or dismiss me. But what can he say? What could anyone say to me? I am so arrogant, even in my despair.


  “If you need help, you must ask God for it. It is a matter between you and Him.”

  “Oh, but I have asked. And He has sent me you.” His face shifts in the candlelight so I can no longer see his expression. But I am too young and too eager to bear his silence for long. “Don’t you understand? We are allies, you and I. If I had wanted to harm you, I could have told my parents how you attacked me that first afternoon.”

  “Except I think you sinned as much against propriety as I did that day,” he says quietly. “As we do now, being here together.” And he starts to gather up his stuff in preparation for blowing out the candles and I watch it all slipping away from me.

  “Why do you dismiss me so? Is it because I am a woman?” I take a breath. “Because it seems to me you have learned enough from them in other ways.” He stops, though he does not turn or in any other way acknowledge my words. “I mean . . . I mean your girl on the stretcher. I wonder how much you paid for her to lie down for you.”

  Now he turns and looks at me, and his face is bloodless in the candlelight. But there is no going back.

  “I know what it is you do at night, sir. I have watched you leaving the house. I have spoken to my brother Tomaso. I think my father would be most unhappy to discover that his chapel painter spends his nights whoring in the slums of the city.”

  At that moment I think it possible that he might cry. For all that God might be in his fingertips, he is sorely inadequate when it comes to dealing with the cunning of our city. How disillusioning it must have been for him, arriving in the new Athens only to find it so noisy with compromise and temptation. Maybe Savonarola is right, after all. Maybe we have indeed become too worldly for our own good.

  “You don’t understand anything,” he says, and his voice is dark with pain.

  “All I am asking is that you look at my work. Tell me what you think, without lying. If you do this simple thing I will not breathe a word. More—I will protect you against my brother. He can be much more vicious than I, and—”

  We both hear it: the crash of the central door opening below us in the house. The same lightning rod of horror runs through us together and without thinking we start to extinguish the candles around us. If someone were to come in now . . . What did I think I had been doing, taking such a risk?

  “My father,” I whisper, as the darkness engulfs us. “He was at a meeting of the Signoria late.”

  On cue I hear his voice, calling up into the stairwell; then, from nearer, another door opening. Tomaso must have fallen asleep waiting for him. Their voices mingle and another door closes. It is quiet.

  Close by in the darkness the red speck of his taper light glows like a firefly. We are so close to each other that his breath grazes my cheek. His smell is all around me, hot and sour, and I feel a sudden sickness in the pit of my stomach. If I put out my hand now I could touch the skin on his chest. I step back as if he has scalded me and send a candle spinning over the flagstone floor. The noise is awful. A moment earlier, and . . .

  “I’ll go first,” I say, when I have regained my balance, and my voice sounds dry with fear. “Stay until you hear the door close.”

  He grunts assent. A flicker of candlelight appears next to the taper glow, with his face illuminated above it. He lifts it and hands it to me. Our eyes meet in the glow. Do we have an agreement? I have no idea. I retrace my footsteps hurriedly to the main door. When I reach it I look back to see his figure in enlarged silhouette against the wall as he pulls the paper down from the apse wall, his arms outstretched like a man crucified.

  Nine

  BACK IN MY ROOM, THE SOUND OF MY FATHER’S AND brother’s voices echoed up the stone staircase from his study below. The pain in my stomach corkscrewed again so that I could barely stay upright. I gave the argument time to end, then made my way out again, determined now to reach my mother’s medicine chest.

  But I was not the only one up who shouldn’t be. Tomaso was coming down the stairs with about as much finesse as a wounded bull. But at least he was trying to be quiet. He was so intent on stepping on air that he walked straight into me, then looked guilty as sin as he straightened up—all of which meant I had something to barter.

  “Alessandra! God’s teeth, you gave me a fright,” he said, in a cracked whisper. “What are doing here?”

  “I heard you and Father arguing,” I lied smoothly. “It woke me up. Where are you going? It’s nearly morning.”

  “I—have to see someone.”

  “What did Father say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did he have news about Plautilla?”

  “No, no. There’s no news from her.”

  “So what did you talk about?” His lips closed a little tighter. “Tomaso?” I said, with soft threat. “What did you and Father talk about?”

  He gave me a cool stare, as if to show that while he understood the bargain, this particular surrender would not cause him much grief. “There’s trouble in the city.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  He paused. “Bad. The night watchmen of Santo Spírito have found two bodies.”

  “Bodies?”

  “A man and a woman. Murdered.”

  “Where?”

  He took a breath. “In the church.”

  “The church! What happened?”

  “No one knows. They found them this morning. They were laid out beneath the pews. Their throats had been slit.”

  “Oh!”

  But there was more. I could see it in his eyes. God help me, though I didn’t mean to, my thoughts strayed to the body of that young woman with dog bites all over her. “What else?”

  “They were both naked. And she had something stuffed in her mouth,” he said grimly, then stopped, as if he might have said enough.

  I frowned to show I didn’t understand.

  “It was his cock.” He watched my confusion, then gave a grim little smile and put his hand down to grab hold of his own crotch. “Understand now? Whoever killed them cut off his cock and stuck it in her mouth.”

  “Oh!” I know I must have sounded like a child, because at that moment I felt like one again. “Oh, who would do such a thing? And in Santo Spírito!”

  But we both knew the answer. The same madman who had cut the marsh girl’s body to pieces just by Santa Croce church.

  “That’s what Father’s meeting was about. The Signoria and the Security Council have decided to move the bodies.”

  “Move them? You mean—”

  “So they’ll be found outside the city.”

  “That’s what Father told you tonight?”

  He nodded.

  But why would he have done that? If you were going to keep such a horror secret, you didn’t do so by telling people. Especially not young men like Tomaso, who spent half their lives out on the streets. Young men who might therefore find themselves at risk if they didn’t change their behavior. Of course. My stomach pain must have addled my brain.

  “But—why should they move them? I mean, if that’s where they were found, shouldn’t—”

  “What happens, Alessandra, do you get stupid at night?” He sighed. “Think about it. The desecration would cause a riot.”

  He was right. It would. Only a few weeks before, a young man had been found chipping bits off the statues in the niches outside the old church of Orsanmichele and had barely escaped with his life after the mob had got hold of him. Erila said he had been touched by madness, but Savonarola had made the city nervous about such blasphemy and, after a summary trial, the hangman had dispatched him three days later with less violence and equally little ceremony. A sacrilege such as this one now would offer fine ammunition to the friar. What were his words about Florence? When the Devil rules a city, his uncrowned consort is lust, and thus does evil proliferate until there is only filth and despair.

  I felt so sick and so frightened that I had to pretend not to be. “You know, Tomaso,” I said with a small laugh, “there are some brothers who would protect their younger sisters a
gainst such stories.”

  “And there are some sisters who spend their days worshipping their brothers.”

  “But what fun would you get from them, pray?” I said softly. “They would surely bore you.”

  For the first time as we looked at each other I wondered how our lives might have been if we had not been cast as enemies. He shrugged slightly and started to move past me.

  “You can’t go out now, not knowing that. It could be dangerous.”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s what you and Father were rowing about, right? He forbade you to go?”

  He shook his head. “I have an appointment, Alessandra. I have to go.”

  I took a breath. “Whoever she is, you can wait.”

  He looked at me in the gloom for a moment and then smiled. “You don’t understand, little sister. Even if I could, she can’t. So. Good night.” He said it quietly and made to leave.

  I put a hand on his arm. “Be careful.”

  He let it rest there for a while before he lifted it off carefully. Was he on the verge of saying something more, or did I only imagine it? He took a sudden step back from me. “God, Alessandra, what’s happened? You’re hurt!”

  “What?”

  “Look at you, you’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. Sure enough, on the front of my shift there was a fresh dark stain.

  And suddenly it all made sense. It wasn’t Plautilla’s pain I was feeling but my own. It had come. The moment I most dreaded in my life. I felt a great flush of shame rise up like fever. My face grew hot with it and I clutched my hands over my night shift, scrunching it up between my fingers until the stain disappeared. And as I did so I felt a trickle of hot liquid run down the inside of my thigh.

  Tomaso, of course, read it all. I felt even sicker with terror at the prospect of his revenge. But instead he did something I have never forgotten. He leaned toward me and touched my cheek. “So,” he said, almost gently, “it seems we both have secrets now. Good night, little sister.” He moved past me down the stairs, and I heard a door below him close quietly.