“I told him not to come. The painter?”
“Allori.”
“Did you not deliver my note?”
“Why on earth would I have chosen this week to stop delivering my lady’s correspondence?”
“He’s in the library?”
Paola lifted the veil again and shook it at her mistress.
Sister Agata, Sister Eugenia, Sister Benedicta. She didn’t want to see him. She wanted a clear head. The jasmine’s petals were rimmed with that coppery hint of a finite life. She wondered if jasmine was edible. She imagined the lady knight saving herself from a handsome painter by stuffing her mouth with poisonous flowers and collapsing on the garden path—marring her beauty by vomiting up bile, but preserving her chaste heart, and her freedom. The windows of the library were still blocked by drapes. It would be dark there, and cool. The table was waiting, on which she would rest her hand, and the chair, against which she could lean her legs if they trembled. She plucked the jasmine; by the time she reached the library door, she’d decide if she would offer it to him. A gesture of friendship. And if he took it, it’d be a sign he wanted more of her, and the friendship would be void.
He didn’t glance up when she walked in; he was busy tending his canvas, which his body shielded from her. She tossed the flower and took her place by the table and chair, propping her hand up with the oval cameo. It was made of onyx: her father Alessandro in profile. Did they use onyx because it was expensive and all the princes preferred it, or did they use it because it was a black stone? [One day they’ll say black is beautiful and both these questions will have the same answer. To you, for whom I’d trade this brimstone life, I send what I see: all of history in a blink. A telescope scrunched to the size of a coin. Patience, I can say, patience, but to tell you nothing matters is as nonsensical as convincing you everything does. They chose onyx because blackness has value, in the deepest historical sense.] But the cameo was merely a prop. Leonor had given him a list of symbols she wanted in the portrait, so Alessandro’s face would become an image of Jerome, or Bacchus. The table, bare now, would become littered with trinkets—some biblical figure, a parable of might, a fruit basket in half decay—that Allori would sketch in during his own lonely hours. This was the last session her body was needed.
“You received my note,” she said.
He grunted, the brush between his teeth as he smudged colors together on his palette.
“You think I’m vain.”
He paused, redirected his eyes from the canvas to her face. Setting down the brush and palette, wiping his hands on the white apron tied around his waist, he came to her and put his hand on her wrist, gently tilting it so the cameo would catch more light. If he took his fingers away, her heart might explode, but he did, and of course it didn’t.
“I think you’re young,” he said, “and stronger than me.”
She wanted him to move back to his easel and finish so she could escape this room and return to her private tortured thoughts of him. Her hummingbird heart was spasming inside her, darting for an exit. “The portrait,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to be remembered for— I wouldn’t like it to last forever.”
“You have too high an opinion of my talents. I predict that I’ll die within the next few decades, and then you’ll die—the slight delay due to your having access to superior foodstuffs—and then within twenty years of your death, depending on the fame of your offspring, this painting will be stuffed away in an attic, or, when the next plague comes, burned to keep one of your descendants warm. He’ll toast bread over the flames of your eyes.”
“You’re saying I won’t be remembered for anything.”
“The bold tend to last,” he said. “If it’s lasting you’re after.”
“No,” she said, wishing he’d take a step back. “I don’t know what I want. I just feel. I feel like a half person.”
He leaned toward her neck with a smile. Whispered, “And the secret is: you could be two people.”
She instinctively put one hand on her abdomen—empty after years of marriage—and one hand on Allori’s chest, her palm flat against the fabric of his shirt. No one had ever called her womanhood a weapon.
She twisted her fingers around his shirt and pulled him close and with a thin sweat prickling her back she kissed him. And she was pleased he didn’t reach out for her, didn’t slide an arm around her back or pull her any closer or wrap her face in his hands, because this was her story after all. After three seconds, she let him go. A blush floated up his face like blood dropped into water.
When Paola came in to say the duchess needed Giulia for a fitting, Allori at his easel inclined his head and said they could be done.
“But are you done?” Paola asked. She tried to sneak a look over his shoulder. “The mistress said you weren’t to be rushed.”
“I believe he’s finishing the veil,” Giulia said. Its golden folds were back around her shoulders.
“The face, actually,” he said.
Paola looked from one to the other.
“The eyes are always the last thing.”
“Well,” said Paola, looking like a woman who very much wanted to have her own face lovingly observed. “She’s got fine ones, my lady.”
“One doesn’t really know what they’re saying till the end of the sitting.”
“Hers are always chatting, sir. Stubborn, that’s for sure, but could always use a coddle, though she wouldn’t let me give it, not since she was out of the nursery. That’s the thing about lords and ladies, we could all use a rough-and-tumble, even only friendly, but they’re too fine for it, too tight-laced for a squeeze.” Paola caught Giulia’s eye over the painter’s shoulder. “Oh, pardon, ma’am. I’ll tell the duchess—I’ll let the duchess know. I don’t know what—” And she swallowed the rest of her words as she retreated from the room, bottom first.
Allori turned back to his subject. “In need of a coddle?”
“I’ll eat you,” she said, and tossed the cameo of her father at his face. “What she failed to mention is I’ve a cannibal appetite.”
He threw his cloth over the portrait and took a few half steps toward her. “Too tight-laced?”
“Whalebones, top to bottom,” she gestured, trying desperately not to smile.
“And what should a suitor do with a little exposed flesh?”
She put her hands protectively over her chest and neck. “A man taking liberties would likely lose an ear.”
“But if the cannibal invited him? With kindness, with the innocence of the nursery?”
“A feast?” she said. He was so close now she was breathing in his breath. A streak of lapis lazuli crossed his chin.
“If they devoured each other,” he said, “they’d be sated. Rendered harmless. We’d be doing the rest of Florence a favor.”
“Saviors,” she said. “Self-immolating.” She looped her hands around his neck and pulled him to her, because what she wanted was the whole length of his body against hers, for her skin to be permanently doubled.
“I never knew a human to taste so sweet.” He licked her cheek. “I am converted.” He smelled slightly of sulfur—or was it the pigment used to make yellow, to turn her skin from white to leonine.
Along with the contracts, the cardinal had brought a banker to explain them, for the priest didn’t trust his wits against Giulia’s charm. They sat at the desk in her husband’s study, and Father Lorenzo asked if he’d be joining them later. “You’d find him a good deal poorer,” she said. “He might be able to purchase one of your orchards?”
“No, no,” the cardinal said, and encouraged the young banker, Iacopo, to take the seat closest to the princess. “You know, I met your grandfather when I was a boy—it was he who encouraged me in the priesthood.” He was pulling out papers and seals.
Her pope grandfather, up two generations of bastards, who had commissioned Michelangelo’s grand Judgment. He died just before Giulia was born, so her family worried she’d inherited his soul, the cold
soul of an old priest with a taste for art. And maybe she had.
“Did he offer to help you out of any financial holes?” she asked the cardinal. He looked at her blankly. “Then perhaps in your next conversation you’ll be speaking admiringly of Giulia de’ Medici, who saved your skin.”
The cow-faced Iacopo drew her attention to various points of the contract, and she inspected the sections he overlooked, and after a half hour of explanation and countersuggestion, both parties agreed to the terms, by which the cardinal’s monastery and its lands would acquire a new patron and defender, and Giulia and her legal descendants would reap a portion of the estate’s profits for as long as both parties were solvent.
“I come from the north, ma’am,” Iacopo said, packing up his quills, “and we’ve a Moorish man there of some wealth, though he’s no duke.”
Giulia blinked at him. “Do give him my regards,” she said. “And ask if he too sprang from the loins of Simonetta da Collevecchio, for I can imagine no other reason why there would be two blacks in Italy.”
Seduction was a game of power, not affection, for it tricked desire and, occasionally, overrode consent. It was a man’s game, she believed.
But those few dancing days were by her design. Allori came with her to the places she asked him, and sometimes he led, but she’d made the story about the lady, not the rake, and this felt rare enough that when he said he couldn’t marry her, she didn’t mind. Drawing him in and letting him go, she thought she’d escape the feeling of impotence.
They were in his studio, Paola prowling the streets outside on an errand for new stockings. Giulia’s wrappings were draped over an easel, and she sat on his lap on the floor, her legs around his waist, his hands feeling through the gaps of the linen to find her skin. She’d never liked her hair down—it poofed out in a cloud of tangles—but it became a wild home for his rooting nose, and she briefly felt her body had been built exactly right.
“You’ll have me paint your children’s portraits,” he said.
“I won’t have any.”
“You’ll wear velvet dresses to torture me.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll fall in love with your husband, and in twenty years, in a snug embrace, you’ll tell him of your affair and the two of you will laugh.”
“I won’t fall in love. I’m not made for it.”
“And you’ll tell him just that and laugh harder.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever come close to loving, and I don’t even love you.”
He pulled his hands from her back and rested them on her thighs. The pleasure in his eyes had paled. “Does that make you feel free?”
“I’m a warrior,” she said, flexing her arm muscle. “Built for battle.”
“And I for tenderness.”
“You can afford it,” she said, and inched her body closer, so she could bend and rest her head on his shoulder, his soft hair brushing her forehead. With one thumb she found his navel, his ombelico, the root of his body, and pressed inside like a rabbit seeking a cave. She closed her eyes.
“Don’t leave,” he said.
Time was the tiger stalking them. An ending—some ending—rolled at them from the horizon, and she was not coward enough to ignore it. Did this mean she was incapable of romance? [I can’t. You have me at my tissues now. Your heart is breaking without your knowledge, and I haven’t human hands to hold the pieces. I would ask Him-who-broke-my-own to stop time so you could learn what happiness is, so you could sit in this idiot boy’s lap until your Bradamantean heart dissolved and all that was left was a messy hot stew of trust and adoration, but God is the great denier. Love’s faulty, my pet, my treasure, but are you not brave?] She was not brave. [Can you not set aside the wrongs of the world long enough to offer the marrow of yourself?] She could not ignore the wrongs of the world. [Then you’ll flit through a half-life, and all will be shadows on the rock.] Could nothing draw out her softness, make a virtue of it? [I’ll send you a gift, my champion, though I cannot promise it will merit your love. Give it my name; call it Samael. If you keep it and adore it—an ounce to the pound I’ve adored you, my copper rose—it will become a king of men, and it will love you as little as you love me. Love, as you’ve divined, is not a holy mingling of equal souls but a bloody sacrifice. Freedom isn’t virtue but abdication.]
She found her eyes wet with tears again, without reason. She rubbed her nose across his bare shoulder and grabbed his neck, pulling his face to within an inch of hers, so his two eyes became one, and she inhaled his exhalations, and there was no thought that kept its secrecy.
He didn’t stand while she dressed. She pulled her laces as tight as she could on her own and wrapped the extra cord around her waist. She asked if he had any final words, and he shook his head, so she walked away, each step straining the binds between them until she pulled the door closed behind her and it snapped—that simile of love, whatever it was she’d almost felt—and in the full sun of the morning street she fell against the wall and sobbed.
Paola found her there; she dropped the bag of stockings. “My lady,” she cried, “he’ll see his mistake, he’ll beg you back, he’ll fight for your hand.” She would’ve defended the right of a rooster to elope with a pig, because she’d once known a boy whose mother thought young Paola too poor, too jolly, and the family had moved to a cousin’s estate, and still Paola included Nino in her nightly prayers and welcomed him lustily in her dreams and deep-down secretly believed that when she least expected it, he would appear at the gates of the Palazzo Pitti with a bouquet of sunflowers in his hand. She would go to the grave with this vision and would never be disappointed.
The weather was fine enough for luncheon out-of-doors, and it was only because she knew Bernardetto already had an appointment in the city that Giulia proposed at breakfast a trip to the old Roman road.
“The cardinal says at night you can see ghosts marching in formation,” she said. “Phantom feathers on their heads.”
“Are you packing a meal to be eaten at night?”
“If you don’t want to come, don’t come.”
“You’ve got to take Paola or I’ll think you intend to flee.”
She couldn’t help staring at the lumps of pastry rolling on his tongue, the blood-red jam flecking the corners of his mouth. It took effort to remind herself he ate no differently from other men.
“Careful for robbers,” he said as she pushed back from the table and dropped her fork from a melodramatic height. “I don’t want anyone bringing me my bride’s head on a plate.” After a pause, he added with a chuckle, “Or her maidenhead.”
She asked Paola to pack paper and ink, two quill pens, her copy of Laura Terracina’s Discorso on Ariosto’s epic, along with the original, Laura Cereta’s letters (if only Giulia had been named Laura), and enough bread and cheese and cherries to feed a ghost army. Folding camp chairs and a blanket for the grass, a parasol in case of sun, a canteen of water and one of wine. Any candies that could be found in the cupboards. The footmen accompanying them were instructed by Paola to remain at some distance from the actual meal, so the princess would feel as if the two women were entirely cut loose.
The sun came in through the carriage window on planes of warmth, and as the shops and ruins fell away into a greener landscape, Giulia felt she was being carried on Apollo’s own cart, and nothing mortal could touch her. The packed earth and gravel roads turned to the great basalt stones of the Appia Antica, and the carriage wheels rattled more smoothly, with a metallic ring. Brief columns of shade from pines and cypresses flicked across Giulia’s face with the regularity of a mother reading rhymes at bed. She closed her eyes.
She dreamed of a hand coming to rest upon her face. Lifting up again, and drifting back down to skin. Here, and here, and here.
She was tenderly poked by Paola in the neck; the maid had called the carriage to a halt beside a wide field sloping up to a tower.
“I found the biggest tomb of all,” she said with reverence.
“Look how much nicer it is to be with dead folk aboveground.”
“You’re a poor tourist, Paola.”
“I nearly stopped us at Domine Quo Vadis, but I thought if ever there was a gentlewoman likely to be unmoved by the footprints of Christ Himself, it would be my own mistress.”
“How on earth did they get his footprints? Scalp his feet?”
“You don’t remember when he appeared to Peter on this road?”
“How could I?”
“And Peter,” Paola continued, her eyes raised rapturously, “he said, ‘Lord, where are you going?’”
Paola returned to shaking out the blanket over the blooming vetch.
“Great sun above, Paola, where was he going?”
“Back to Rome, of course,” she said, “to be crucified again.”
After several adjustments of furniture and footmen, Giulia was settled in her camp chair with the sun at her back and an unimpeded view of the mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, its toothy crenellations nibbling at the sky. Paola knelt on the blanket to unpack their baskets of food and set up the folding table with the instruments of writing and reading. She passed a porcelain plate to her mistress and asked which of the delicacies she’d like first. Giulia spun the plate slowly through her hands.
“And what do you know of Cecilia Metella?”
“Nothing, my lady. I’ll start you out with the cappelletti.”
“What’s inside?”
“Fresh rooster, ma’am, and cheese.”
“I mean the tomb.”
“Well, I’d be surprised if it weren’t Cecilia Metella herself. We’ll get some food in you before you begin conquistador-ing.”
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