Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  The French king showed great leniency to the Florentine citizens. But this was expected. We all knew Naples, not Florence, had been the prize Charles sought. Only a handful of people died in the weeks of the occupation, no more than did without a foreign army on its streets.

  The true casualty was Florence’s soul.

  It has been flogged and battered unmercifully, its pride in tatters, its status as a republic dismantled. It is into your hands that we must now lay all our hopes of salvation for this city.

  Rebirth. Rinascimento. What the Medici so brilliantly began, we will once more see reborn.

  Your devoted servant,

  Cato

  Holy Father,

  In the months since the French invasion, the Prior of San Marco—having declared Florence a Holy City, a “New Jerusalem,” with Christ its king—has, with the consent of the Signoria, created it a theocracy. Savonarola has proclaimed that all Medici supporters must be put to death immediately. His bonfires glow weekly from the main piazza.

  He demands continual fasting from the people, most of whom comply, grateful that their “Great Prophet,” Savonarola, first warned them of the French king’s invading army, then spared the populace from his fury.

  There is, however, some resistance to report. A faction calling themselves “Mad Dogs” have quite boldly begun deriding the prior’s most ardent followers, calling them “prayer mumblers” and “snivelers,” and even banging drums in church trying to drown out Savonarola’s sermons. Of these men there are few, but it is said their numbers are growing.

  I will keep you informed of all progress.

  I remain your devoted servant,

  Cato

  Cato,

  As you must know by now, Charles’s army moved through Rome without a struggle. Once he had left to successfully capture his main objective—Naples—I took the action you and I discussed on your last visit here, and believe me, we will, though not without bloodshed, see a happy outcome to the problems that now plague Italy.

  Yours in Christ,

  Roderigo

  Holy Father,

  I am thrilled that all is going according to plan. The “Holy League” you created to drive the French from Italy was a stroke of pure genius. Of course every Italian leader in his right mind became a member. How well you knew that Savonarola was not in his right mind and would refuse to join.

  Now that you have summoned the prior to Rome to explain his support of the invaders, do you think he will come?

  Your faithful servant,

  Cato

  Cato,

  It does not surprise me that our friend has refused my summons into Rome to answer charges of consorting with Italy’s enemy, calling King Charles “The Chosen of God,” and continuing to make his false prophecies. Savonarola’s excuse for not coming was that Florence could not spare him, and that “God did not wish for him to come.” To my amusement, he warned me that I should make immediate provisions for my own salvation, and has taken to writing letters to the French king suggesting that I be deposed from the papacy, though when he calls me an “infidel and heretic” he may not be far from wrong.

  When I wrote him back I forbade him to deliver any more sermons, but by your letter I see he has been conducting them daily.

  I have no further choice. The courier that brings you this correspondence has also delivered to the prior his Writ of Excommunication. The Florentine Signoria has also been admonished to keep this son of iniquity out of any pulpit, or else to dispatch him to Rome. I believe they understand my displeasure. If the church is disobeyed in this most serious matter, all of Florence will find itself under a papal interdict.

  Yours in Christ,

  Roderigo

  Holy Father,

  Though Savonarola silenced himself for half the year—a period during which I worried that our entire enterprise might fall to ruin—the Prior of San Marco has finally shown his true colors. On Christmas Day he openly defied you, celebrating High Mass in the Duomo to a congregation in the thousands. From his pulpit he denounced the Church of Rome as a Satanic Institution, one that promoted whoredom and vice.

  I cannot imagine there is much more to say.

  Your faithful servant, Cato

  Dearest Leonardo,

  You must come to Florence at once. Savonarola has been arrested.

  Your loving mother

  CHAPTER 40

  I knew that when I opened my front door Leonardo would be standing there, yet the sight of him thrilled me as deeply as had seeing him at sixteen, posing as the biblical David in Verrocchio’s bottega garden. Ours had been a lifetime of separations and homecomings, none of them ever the same, except for the solace we always found in each other’s arms.

  Papa had come down to greet him and I watched them embrace, my son in the full bloom of manly vigor, my father on the cusp of frailty.

  “I worried I would be recognized in the city,” Leonardo said, pulling off his hooded cloak, “but it is more that I do not recognize Florence. What a sad, gloomy place it’s become.” He looked around him at the sparsely furnished ground floor—a few benches and a storeroom. “Not to see an apothecary where you two are . . .”

  “We haven’t even a garden,” Papa said, climbing the stairs to the first floor.

  Leonardo and I followed him into the salon. This was comfortable enough, with some cushioned chairs and a table. But the books that had always been so evident in all our homes were strangely absent. Of this there was no need to comment.

  We sat at the table. The simple dinner I’d prepared awaited. Papa poured wine.

  “I’m glad you and Grandfather were together in such terrible times,” Leonardo said.

  I reached for Papa’s hand and closed my fingers around his. “We were very blessed. Poor Pico. He died on the morning the French marched in and occupied the city. I’m sure that one tragedy caused the other.”

  “Thankfully there were no casualties from the invasion in my household but one,” Leonardo said. “My bronze horse. All that metal I’d collected for it was melted down to make shot for the French military. Certainly I was bereft for a time. I’d worked so long on the thing. Then to see it used that way . . .” He allowed himself a wry smile. “But Ludovico took pity on me.”

  “The Last Supper fresco on the refectory wall?” I asked, remembering mention of it in a letter from him.

  Leonardo sighed. “I am mightily tired of all these Christian subjects demanded of me, but that is where my living is made, I suppose.” He turned to Papa. “I’m sorry to say I had to kill your daughter. Neighbors and vendors kept asking me why they had not seen Caterina, so I told them she was ill. Signora Ricci insisted she must come see her friend and bring some remedies.” He looked at me with a long face. “Sadly, you died. I tearfully bought three pounds of wax for your funeral candles and paid eight soldis for your bier. I applied for the license for burial, but the ceremony took place so quickly—and I was so distraught—that you were dead and buried before anyone knew it. When you return to Milan I’m afraid you’ll have to assume another woman’s disguise. Perhaps you could be my housekeeper,” he joked.

  “What of your flying machine?” I asked.

  “My first attempt to soar was off the roof of Corte Vecchio. It was a failure, though it could have been a bit less humiliating. I came close to murdering Salai. After I’d crashed to a landing in the center of the Cathedral Piazza . . .”

  I gasped aloud at that. I could tell Leonardo was enjoying his storytelling.

  “. . . my darling son came running over at the head of a concerned crowd of Milanese, and once finding me alive and in one piece, began to laugh so hard that he bent over double and fell to the ground. Of course his merriment was contagious to everyone . . . but me.”

  “I know you take it lightly,” Papa said, “this obsession of yours to fly. But if something should happen to you, Leonardo, think of your mother. . . .”

  My child was suddenly contrite, but when he turned to look a
t me he found me trying to suppress my amusement. “Are you smiling, Mama?”

  I put my fist to my lips. “Sorry. I was just remembering . . .” I gazed at my father. “When I was a girl . . .”

  “A wild creature,” he said.

  “. . . all I wanted to do was run in the hills and the meadows. Throw my arms wide and pretend I was a hawk, gliding in the clouds, graceful and free.” I fixed my eyes on Leonardo, understanding. “It is the freedom , is it not?”

  He nodded once, overcome, his eyes suddenly glittering with tears. But when we looked to my father we found him gazing blankly at his plate.

  “No shop, no garden, no customers,” he said with an air of self-indulgence I had never in all my life heard from him. “Not so long ago I was traveling the Silk Road on the back of a camel. Now I can feel the fingers of decrepitude clutching at me.”

  “Well, you just slap them away, Papa,” I said. “A new day is dawning in Florence. And you’ve no excuse for getting old.”

  He seemed to collect himself, sitting up straighter in his chair.

  “To Pico. To Lorenzo. To Florence,” Leonardo intoned. “And to the return of Reason.”

  We three clinked our glasses in a solemn, triumphant pyramid and drank in grateful silence. I was afraid to believe it possible. But that day was coming, and we at this table had helped to make it so.

  CHAPTER 41

  She sweet, sickening stench of roasting human flesh assaulted my nostrils, yet I could not bring myself to turn away from the sight atop a single platform in the center of the Piazza della Signoria—two burning figures, now unrecognizable save for bits of heavy brown cloth still clinging to their charred bodies. As I clutched Papa’s and Leonardo’s hands for strength, I prayed that the men had died a quick death by hanging before their incineration.

  I could see some onlookers in the crowded square, “Mad Dogs” more than likely, who seemed to derive satisfaction from these deaths. But many more Florentines were watching with grim, fearful expressions.

  Now from the Signoria came a flurry of motion. A handful of city fathers, somber in their long tunics, were followed out by two Signoria guards, dragging by the armpits a man in the coarse brown robe of a Dominican monk toward a second larger and yet-unlit pyre, piled thickly with pitch-covered logs and branches.

  Though his black hair was matted with sweat and blood, and his face covered with purple bruised swellings no doubt inflicted during torture in the previous weeks, the man was clearly recognizable. While conscious, Savonarola appeared almost boneless, his arms hanging limp from the shoulders, the tops of his bare feet dragging across the stone piazza.

  “Leonardo?” I heard whispered behind us by a familiar voice, but I hesitated turning.

  Leonardo did. “Sandro?” he said quietly.

  “Is that you?” Botticelli whispered back, incredulous.

  “It is.”

  They were keeping their voices very low. Leonardo grasped Papa’s and my elbows and turned us. “This is my mother, Caterina—Cato’s sister—and my grandfather, Ernesto. They’ve moved from Vinci. They’re living here now.”

  “As I understand it,” Botticelli said to Papa, “Cato’s father was also his tutor.”

  “Correct,” Papa modestly said.

  “Cato is a brilliantly trained scholar. Even Ficino was impressed with your son’s learning.”

  Papa beamed with pleasure.

  Botticelli then turned to me, taking up my hand to kiss it. He stared up at me. “Cato never told me his sister was a twin. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “My brother has probably told me more about you,” I said, working hard at elevating my voice to a womanly timbre, “than he told you about me.”

  We all heard a low groan from the prisoner.

  “Strappado,” Botticelli muttered. “It’s said that when they drop a man from a height—his arms bound above his head—the bones and sinews of his shoulders break and snap.” He could not hide a hint of a smile. “And how is Cato?” Botticelli asked. “We haven’t seen him since Lorenzo . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “He’s well,” Leonardo answered. “Traveling in the East.”

  “We’ve missed his company.”

  “We?” Leonardo said.

  Botticelli moved even closer. “Some of us have recently begun to gather again. Very quietly.” He turned to Papa. “Perhaps you would like to join our little circle, Ernesto.”

  I saw a light come into Papa’s eyes. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.”

  Savonarola moaned loudly and called out the name of his savior. My eyes were drawn back to the platform as the man was hoisted, his broken legs bumping up the platform steps, and tied to the hardwood stake. Conspicuous in his absence was a priest to give the convicted man his final blessing. The hooded executioner, allowing his charge no time for last words, unceremoniously wrapped a knotted rope around the Prior of San Marco’s neck.

  “Is it not fitting that he should die in this way?” said Botticelli.

  “He will no doubt burn in the Hell of which he so eloquently spoke,” Leonardo answered with more than a little bitterness.

  As the garrote tightened and the beady eyes began to bulge, I turned away. Leonardo and Papa did the same. None of us enjoyed the suffering of our fellow humans.

  “Are you leaving now?” Botticelli asked. “Before he burns?”

  “Knowing he burns is enough,” Leonardo said, clapping a hand on Botticelli’s shoulder.

  “It’s good to see you, my friend,” Sandro said. He nodded to Papa. “Ernesto.” Then he bowed to me. “Signora da Vinci.”

  The three of us made our way against the crush of Florentines, who, whether ghoulishly pleased or mournfully beating their breasts, were now surging forward to witness the final moments of the monk’s agony.

  A pair of boys who still had the short-cut hair of Savonarola’s angels, but now dressed as other lads of their own age, stood on a cart on tiptoe, straining over the crowd to view the spectacle.

  “They’re hoisting his body to the top of the pole!” one cried.

  “They’ll soon light the fire!”

  “Come on,” said the other. “I don’t want to miss it.”

  They jumped down from their perch and plowed into the seething mass. The boys would no doubt be at the front when the torch touched the tar-soaked pyre of the one they had not so long ago called “the Mouthpiece of God.”

  Just as we reached the edge of the piazza a great cry went up from the assembled, and a blast of heat at our backs signaled Savonarola’s destruction into ashes.

  My stomach turned at the thought of what must now be occurring, but as I felt arms on either side of me sliding round the crooks of my elbows and guiding me away, I heaved a long-awaited sigh of relief.

  With every step we took farther from the square our spirits grew lighter. I noticed people coming out from the houses and standing in the streets, silently gazing in the direction of the pillar of smoke rising from the piazza. It was hard to know what they felt—free-falling terror that the man to whom they had entrusted their immortal souls was no more, or the sweetness of waking from a long bad dream.

  With a glance at one another, Leonardo and I stopped in our tracks, pulling Papa to a rather sudden halt.

  “What is it?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Papa.”

  “Why have we stopped?”

  “We are on Via Riccardi.”

  He turned and looked at the boarded-up shop in front of which we now stood.

  “Is this the house I own?”

  Without another word Leonardo and I steered him to the end of the block and back into the alley. When I pushed open the gate we were greeted by the sight of a riotously overgrown garden and two carts piled high under their canvas covers.

  Leonardo was pulling vines away from the green and gold apothecary sign, which was propped up against the back wall. While faded, it was still as pretty as the day he had painted it.

&nbs
p; “What have you done, Caterina?” Papa said, never taking his eyes from the wagons.

  “You might ask your grandson. He was the one who stopped in Vinci before coming here.”

  “I saw my uncle Francesco while I was there,” Leonardo said. “He helped me pack your things up.” He turned to Papa. “He sent you his fondest regards.”

  I had unlocked the door and stepped inside. My father and son came in after me.

  The look on Papa’s face was one of childlike wonder, and I admit I was not unaffected myself. The years had gone easier on the house this time. Some rodents had had their way with the bins, and some spiders with the ceiling corners, but when I opened the door to the shop I was shocked that aside from a mild mustiness, the ghosts of herbal fragrances still lingered in the air.

  Papa walked through but it was too dark to see. Leonardo went to the front door and pulled it open. He was confronted by nailed boards, which he commenced to kick out with his booted heel. He was making a terrible racket, but I found myself transfixed.

  All I could hear was the tinkling of the bell on the lintel above the door, and I saw again the moment I had first laid eyes on Lorenzo standing there, taking in the sights and smells of my brand-new apothecary. I smiled recalling how we had laughed, nailing the bell in place, the first of our many adventures together.

  Suddenly the room was filled with light, Leonardo having also pulled away the boards from the large window.

  I heard my father’s exclamation of delight, and watched him turn round and round, taking in the lofty ceiling and soft green walls and shelves, the dusty but still bright white marble countertops.

  “What’s all the noise?” I heard a man cry, and looked through the front glass to see Benito, a grown man, now carrying a small child in his arms, a young woman and a twelve-year-old boy beside him. Leonardo and Benito were embracing.