Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  Papa looked at me questioningly.

  “Our neighbors. Lovely neighbors. We should go out and let Leonardo introduce us.”

  Benito had helped us empty the carts, moving our belongings into the house. His sweet wife, Elena, had rushed next door for a pail and rags, and had gone to work scrubbing the shelves and counters, so that by the time the light started to fail us, Papa and I and Marcello—a jolly boy with a thousand questions—had already begun returning a few of the pots and jars to their proper places.

  Leonardo himself carried our boxes of precious books to the first-floor sitting room, and our neighbors promised to come back for all the help they could possibly give.

  Earlier, outside the shop, when Leonardo had introduced me to Benito as his mother, I’d seen a look in my old friend’s eyes that told me he knew the truth. Perhaps that he, of all the men and women I had met in my male disguise, had known it all along. But nothing was said. There were no sly smiles of collusion. Just a quiet and graceful acceptance that Cato would not be returning and that Caterina, Leonardo da Vinci’s mama, had suddenly come to live with her father above the apothecary next door. There was also a suggestion made that Marcello had not been promised into any apprenticeship yet, and perhaps if Ernesto had need of a helper . . .

  When our neighbors had gone we lit three torches, and with silent purpose climbed the stairs. We rose past the sitting room, and then my bedroom, and up a final flight to the third floor. We stood, the family trio, staring at the laboratory door.

  “It is safe, Mama,” Leonardo said. “We have made it safe to think again. Inquire. Experiment.”

  I inhaled deeply and pushed it open.

  Before us was a scene that reeked of fear and hurried leavings. An overturned bench. A glass beaker broken on the floor. The alchemical furnace dusty and stone-cold.

  A fierce upwelling of visions assaulted me—opening this door thirty years before, the four walls that had admitted me into a brotherhood of brave and venerable minds; the elderly man standing behind me who had dared school a daughter in the secrets of enlightenment, making possible that admittance; the son without whose close presence I refused to live, he whose love had drawn me to this city, this house, this room; and back further still to the night in Vinci that, in my agony of lost love and Papa’s fear of losing me, we had together allowed his alchemical fire to die. I saw Vespasiano Bisticci squinting over a thousand-year-old manuscript and calling out its mysteries as Ficino, Landino, and Pulci debated the properties of quicksilver. I saw dark Lorenzo in his loose white shirt propped lazily on the stool, knees wide, arms open and inviting me into his embrace. And of course that smile.

  “Help me with this,” I heard Leonardo say. He had dragged several rotted boards from the shop up the stairs. He told Papa and me to break them into small pieces, then began stacking them in the furnace. I saw him pull from his satchel his folio, ripping out several sheets of paper, crumpling and stuffing them beneath the wood.

  My heart began to race at the thought of the sudden industry and the purpose of what we were doing. I glanced at Papa. His eyes were aglow.

  We gathered round the furnace, and in the moment before Leonardo struck the flint, we each whispered our own blessing.

  “To the great teachers . . .”

  “The Eternal Wisdom . . .”

  “The heart that loves . . .”

  A tiny flame was held to a corner of crumpled paper. I watched breathless as it caught and burned blue for an endless moment, then spluttered merrily to yellow white, setting the tinder-dry wood alight. The heat was sudden, warming our faces and chests.

  My father’s hand on my shoulder drew me to him. Leonardo he had embraced with his other arm. Papa was strong again, as he had been on returning from his travels. Even now he grew younger, not older, with every pop and crackle in the furnace.

  “Is there thanks enough to offer?” I heard him say.

  “Between the three of us,” I replied, “there is more than enough.”

  A knot in a burning board exploded noisily, causing us to startle, then laugh at our fright.

  Leonardo, as though roused from a reverie, sprang to the woodpile and threw more fuel on the blaze. And it was a blaze, burning with an almost conscious force. Dead for so long. Given new life. Our promise of eternity.

  Leonardo would surely be seeing the Phoenix rising from the cold ashes, taking to the air as he dreamed himself doing. Would succeed in doing one day. Leonardo in flight. The thought made my own heart soar. The oiled canvas wings in graceful curves, his long hair whipping behind him, the wind lifting him higher and higher into the clouds. . . .

  “So many books to unpack,” I heard Papa mutter with delight.

  “You’ll show me which ones you want brought up here, Grandfather,” Leonardo told him, “and which ones should be left in the sitting room.”

  “There are some he likes to keep at his bedside,” I told my son, “to read by candlelight.”

  “Come, tell me now.” Leonardo took the lead, and Papa followed him down the stairs.

  I added one more large wood fragment to the furnace, thinking ahead to the future source of its fuel. There was enough from the boarding-up of the shop, I thought, surely enough for this night. Tomorrow we would put in a large supply. Young Marcello would have his first job helping Papa.

  I pushed the furnace door closed very slowly, loath to lose sight of what we had begun today, but as it clanged shut, despite the lost sight of the alchemical fire, I knew how it would burn—unstoppable, warming and fomenting the minds of all who lay themselves open before it.

  I sighed with the deepest pleasure, remembering the Medici—Lorenzo, his father, and his father’s father, wondering now if, from where they stood, they saw that the Light of Reason had been lit once again in Florence.

  Somehow I believed they did.

  CHAPTER 42

  Papa had insisted on staying the night at his new home, but Leonardo and I had come back to Castella Lucrezia and both of us, exhausted from the day’s events, slept well into the next morning.

  When I came down the stairs into the sitting room I saw he’d set up an easel near the street window, a thin wood board standing up in it. He was laying out his brushes and some colors he had just ground up himself.

  He smiled when he saw me. “Will you indulge me with a sitting today?”

  “How can I say no to you? And what a day of celebration it is, Leonardo. I believe I will be able to breathe more easily than I have in a very long while.”

  As he arranged several down pillows on the chair he had set in place, I thought, For better or worse I am with this man, have been with him as a barnacle holds fast to the hull of a ship, and that after all the years grow together—wood, shell, muscle—into one impossible amalgam.

  I went to stand before the undraped work. It was one I recognized. I’d begun sitting for it after my second arrival in Milan. It was quite small, bordered on either side by a painted pillar. The background, exceedingly dark, even foreboding, featured a winding road that led to a rocky inlet below, confined on all sides by jagged, fearsome-looking peaks and precipices. That background had always seemed a strange compliment to the woman of the portrait, who sat so softly and perfectly composed in the foreground.

  I found her somehow familiar, somehow unrecognizable. Surely she was me. But how would I know? I had spent so little time over the years appraising myself in a mirror. This woman was dressed in the low-bodiced olive gown that Leonardo had gifted me when I’d taken back my womanhood, its pale green cape slung over her left shoulder. The long tawny sleeves had been pushed up her arms in many soft folds, allowing the gently crossed hands to be seen clear above the wrists. The woman in the painting was younger than me by some thirty years, and was strikingly beautiful. If there was something slightly masculine about the broadness of her face and the defiant glint in the eyes, it was balanced, if not overridden, by the feminine quality of the features and an overwhelming sense that this creature
was, if not the Madonna herself, a mother who had known every pleasure and every pain of womanhood.

  Leonardo’s artistry had rendered more than the details of her features—the black hair parted in the center curling prettily on the softly rounded breasts, a delicate fringe of dark eyelashes, rosy pink nostrils, and pulsing blue veins in the hollow of her neck. He had imbued in the woman’s expression an air of all-knowingness and deep compassion.

  “Tell me honestly”—Leonardo had come to stand by my side—“did I ever look this way?”

  He regarded his work for some time.

  “You were far more lovely. Your chin was more oval than square. But the eyes are yours, and the lovely high bones of your cheeks.”

  “Will you ever finish it?” I said, teasing him.

  “I think it will take a lifetime to satisfy me.”

  He led me to a chair, tucking some cushions into the small of my back and under my arms for comfort, arranging my hair around my shoulders and covering it with a fine black gossamer veil. He arranged my hands right over left, as the woman in the painting, and gently pushed my sleeves away from my wrists.

  “I so wish Lorenzo could have lived to see this day,” I said.

  “He knew it would come,” Leonardo replied, moving to one side to observe the canvas in a different light. “There was so much Il Magnifico had already accomplished before he died. The Academy. The library. His part in the conspiracy.” Leonardo’s expression grew suddenly shy. “The two of you together. . . .”

  I looked down at my hands as I added, “The Great Work.”

  “Have I not captured it in your portrait? All of it? The dark. The light. The female. The male. Your magic. Your memories.”

  I sighed. Aristotle had rightly said that memory was the “scribe of the soul,” and Aeschylus believed it “the mother of all wisdom.” But the great sage Pericles spoke most truly for my life, I thought then, saying that what you left behind was not what was engraved in stone monuments, but what was woven into the lives of others.

  “So many memories,” I murmured, my eyes softly tilting upward, beginning to see it all again.

  “Come, Mama,” said Leonardo in the gentlest voice, “before I lose you entirely to the past . . . won’t you give me a smile?”

  EPILOGUE

  Dearest Leonardo,

  I would say I hope this letter finds you well, but I am not at all certain that this letter will find you at all. I write from the deck of the Portuguese galleon Isabel, flagship of Captain Fernão Cabral’s fleet, finally within sight of our destination. It is hard to breathe, though whether this stems from the excitement of our imminent landfall or the air so hot and humid it feels thick as soup, I cannot say.

  I am no stranger to excitement after this voyage of six months’ time, having sailed west all the way to the New World to avoid unfavorable winds at the Gulf of Guinea, and being scared out of my wits during a violent storm at the Cape of Africa when four of the fleet’s twelve ships, with all their crews, were lost.

  It may be my imagination, because we can barely see the little town we are headed toward nestled low on the western coast, the one renowned for its spice trade, but I swear I’ve had whiffs of coriander and cumin wafting in my nose.

  Some rowboats have apparently come out to meet us. I can see the dark-skinned, close-bearded fishermen in their long gauze shirts and white head-wraps waving, as though they expect us.

  The question is, what shall I expect from my travels? Nothing? Everything? Perhaps, like Papa, I will fall in love again. Climb into the Northern Mountains that he said dwarfed the Alps. Visit erotic temples. The tomb of Jesus. I will open my heart and my mind to all of it.

  I do hope to find India a friendly, peaceful place where somewhere, someday, under the spreading boughs of an ancient tree sits a cadre of philosophers—wise men from the East—who might enjoy a long afternoon of conversation with a hoary old gentleman from Florence.

  On the 16th day of September in the year 1500

  from Calicut,

  Your loving mother,

  Caterina

  She sat on the thronelike chair in her sleeping chamber and sighed deeply. Her eyes were closed, not out of weariness but of boredom. Bianca, the Holy Roman Empress, felt this day, as she did every other day, neither holy, nor Roman, nor imperial. She had just sent away her ladies and that insufferable religious tutor Maximilian had imposed upon her—he and his droning scriptural lessons every day but the Sabbath.

  Her husband had let go the one intellectual companion she most valued—her old and beloved Greek master—replacing him with the hated Catholic cleric. She was, Maximilian commanded her, to dedicate herself to embroidery and lute playing, though she was forbidden to sing as her voice, in his estimation, was as screechy as a cat in heat.

  This treatment, she knew, had been punishment for failing to provide Maximilian with children. Heirs—male or female. “What earthly good is a barren wife?” he said with repetitive cruelty. “More particularly a barren archduchess?” She was beginning to believe such sentiments were true. Why did I have to be a wife at all?

  Bianca rose, cursing the jewel-encrusted gown she was forced by her high and mighty station to wear every waking hour of the day. She moved to the window and looked out at a bleak wintertime Vienna. Court was here now, and not Innsbruck. She wondered which palace she hated more.

  Not the palace, she corrected herself. The people who live in it. All of Maximilian’s time and thoughts were spent on armies and weaponry, allies and enemies. Italy, the Swiss, Turkish pirates, the blasted French. Whenever she’d tried to engage him in conversation on any other topic he’d snapped at her. “Politics, not philosophy, rules the world,” he liked to say. “War, not words, forms the future.” His heart was as cold as the frozen ground in the courtyard.

  At least to her. He doted on the children from his first marriage—Phillip, who had been blessed with so much unnatural beauty for a Hapsburg man he was called “the Handsome,” and Margaret, who, to everyone’s chagrin, had been uglier than sin but imbued with a mind like a steel trap.

  Maximilian did spare Bianca the humiliation of a string of mistresses, though sometimes she wondered if the endless flowery poems he wrote about the wooing of and marriage to his first wife, Mary, were not somehow more insulting.

  The knock on her door was startling, lost as she’d been in the self-pity that had in the last months settled over her thoughts like a heavy blanket. “What is it, Marta?” she called out to her lady. The door opened and the woman entered wearing an expression Bianca had never seen on her maid’s face in all the years she’d attended her.

  “There is a . . . crate for you, madam. A rather heavy one.”

  “For me? From whom?”

  “I don’t know,” Marta said, her eyes wide with excitement. “It has an odd smell about it. Something like spice.”

  Bianca gestured to have the thing brought in and four footmen—one on each corner of the red-painted wooden crate, thickly banded by iron—set it down heavily in the center of the empress’s Turkey carpet.

  “Shall I open it for you?” said one of the servants.

  Bianca eyed the box warily, but excitement was beginning to rise in her. “Cut the bands and loosen the lid,” she ordered. “Then leave me.”

  “My lady,” Marta pleaded, “at least let me stay with you when you open it. There’s no telling . . .”

  “It’s too small to be hiding an assassin,” Bianca said. “I’ll take my chances alone.”

  When they had all gone she circled the red crate and one by one discarded the iron bands. With some effort she wrenched off the top, and with a crash the sides collapsed outward, leaving in the center of her floor what looked to be an ordinary Italian marriage chest. Whom-ever the bride had been, she’d clearly not been a noblewoman. The birds and flowers were painted with only moderate skill, and no gold or precious gems had been used in its decoration.

  Why would someone send me a marriage chest? she won
dered. She sat back on her throne chair to gaze at the thing. She was not afraid of what she would find inside. And she was exceedingly curious. She just wished to prolong the mystery of it. Mystery had become so rare in her life of late. She would savor the moment. Think of every possibility of the treasure within it, and from whom it had come. She began this exercise, but found her mind blank. She could not, after all, conceive of anyone who would care to send her anything.

  Bianca jumped up and strode to the marriage chest. The lid came up easily, and a strong whiff of pungent spices wafted up in a fragrant, invisible cloud. Her jaw dropped at the sight of the contents.

  Books. Many books.

  Some were bound in leather and looked to have come from Gutenberg’s revolutionary press. Some were rolled parchments. Others were ancient manuscripts decorated in gold leaf. Now her pulse pounded in her neck. She lifted one vellum volume and opened the cover. The Sonnets of Lorenzo de’ Medici. She placed it aside, then took up another. It was in Greek—Plato’s Timaeus. Her heart soared at the sight of that beloved language.

  Beneath was a huge tome. She went to the lectern on which her Bible lay open and put it on the floor. She carried over the heavy book and laid it open to a random and well-thumbed page. It was in Latin, but the contents were certainly Hermetic in nature. Are these recipes, she wondered, for alchemical processes?

  Now she removed a muslin bag that reeked of an exquisite and exotic fragrance. She loosened the string and peered inside. Smaller muslin bags! Each must hold a different spice. They smelled, unquestionably, of the East.

  Then there were more books. Some in Hebrew, a language she had never learned. Here was a scroll in a leather pouch. It was incomprehensibly old. With all the delicacy she could manage she unrolled it. Antigone! Bianca could not be sure, but it occurred to her this might be—no, could it possibly be a copy from the time of the great play-wright himself ?