by Robyn Young
Feeling around at the other end, he found another latch. Lifting it carefully, there was a click as a catch released and the door opened. He peered cautiously into a bare room, shuttered and empty. As he squeezed through, his leg scraped on something. Wincing, he looked down to see a nail poking out of the floor. He saw a scrap of material caught on it and pulled it free, thinking it had been torn from his hose. But his hose were blue. This wisp of wool was black. He thought of the pope’s men, slipping down the stairs, at one with the shadows in their cloaks.
Out in the room, he rose, brushing dust from his hands, to see a row of cupboards on this side too, only these made of plain wood. Marking in his mind the one he’d come through, he crossed to the door and, when he heard nothing beyond, opened it and stepped into a passage.
The palazzo of Lorenzino and Giovanni was smaller and less ostentatious than their cousin’s. Jack, who had only entered the ground-floor reception rooms during the masked ball at Epiphany, was surprised by how plain and dingy the upper storeys were by comparison: a series of boxy storerooms, some empty, others cluttered with chests and broken furniture, and cramped chambers he took for servants’ rooms. The third and second floors were much the same; the rooms here grander in scale, but furnished sparsely, and there was little in the way of the extravagant gilding and marble embellishments, paintings and statues that graced the Palazzo Medici. Jack knew Lorenzo’s cousins spent most of their time at Cafaggiolo, out in the Mugello, and guessed more of their money and attention had been lavished there.
He was descending to the first floor, where some decoration was now visible – a painting of the Virgin on one wall, a small bust of a full-lipped man with curly hair perched on a plinth that he thought might be of Giovanni di’ Pierfrancesco, the younger of the two brothers – when he heard footsteps. He darted behind the corner of the passage as a figure emerged from a door next to the bust. He caught sight of black robes and a pale fuzz of hair around a tonsure. For one shocked moment, he thought it was Marsilio Ficino. But, as the figure strode away down the passage, he realised it wasn’t the elderly priest, but the friar from San Marco. Fra Giorgio Antonio Vespucci – Amerigo’s uncle and tutor to Lorenzo’s cousins.
A memory drifted across his mind. That day, when he’d followed Pico from Fiesole – the day he discovered Prince Djem – he had seen a figure in black stalking the halls of the palazzo. He had assumed at the time it was Marsilio, returned early from the villa. He thought of Lorenzino, the night of the feast, walking out with Amerigo, those words he had murmured about family. After all he has done to yours? Thought of Amerigo’s interest in what might lie beyond the Western Ocean, his feverish talk of lost islands and the sailor – Columbus. Hadn’t Lorenzo said Fra Giorgio had been a member of the Academy under his grandfather? A translator of manuscripts like Amaury?
After waiting, listening for footsteps, sweat trickling down his neck, Jack risked a look inside the room the friar had emerged from, the door of which was ajar. It was a study, not as expansive as Lorenzo’s and nowhere near as jammed with wealth, but well-appointed, with a desk and cushioned chair beneath a pair of tall windows, a few paintings on the walls – scenes of Roman temples and men in togas – a large armoire, shelves of books and rows of chests.
Jack tried the doors of the armoire, almost as high as the ceiling, but it was locked. The chests too. He crossed to the desk, ears pricked for sound of approach. One of the shutters was open at his back, a hot breath of wind curling the papers on the desk. He glanced through them. They looked like accounts, but nothing that held any significance for him. He cursed beneath his breath. Time was running short. He should return to the palazzo – let the signore deal with this. But this knowledge came with a stab of frustration. All these months and now it felt as though an answer were just in front of him; one last thread that might unravel the final knot. He shook his head. This wasn’t his business any more.
As Jack turned to go, his boot caught something under the desk. Glancing down, he found a coffer, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He bent to move it back in place, then saw a key poking from the lock. He paused in the stillness, head cocked. Hearing nothing, he lifted the coffer, placed it on the desk and turned the key. Inside was a compartment filled with a score or more other keys. But there was no time left to go exploring. He was about to close the lid, when he realised the compartment only went two-thirds down inside the coffer. There was something underneath. Pinching the sides, he pulled, felt the whole thing lift free. Beneath was a smaller section. He caught a glimpse of silver pieces and thought they were coins. But, as he lifted the compartment away, he realised his mistake. They weren’t coins. They were badges. Each one, the head of a wolf.
As he stood there staring down at them, the world beyond the shutters erupted with noise. Jack whipped round to see dozens of birds casting into the sky from window sills and rooftops, the air filling with the clapping of wings. He could hear dogs barking – some near, some far – as if every animal in the city had awoken at once. Moments later he felt it: a low rumbling, like a cart on cobbles or distant thunder. The wolves in the coffer were trembling. Then, he knew. He’d felt this before.
Beneath his hands the desk was rattling, the shutters at his back banging. Books tottered off the shelves. The clothes’ perch jolted on its base, went crashing to the floor. Bits of masonry were crumbling from the walls, cracks snapping across the plaster in white puffs of dust. He could hear the sound of things above and below, outside and in, collapsing and falling. Screams in the distance. The wild clang of church bells in their towers. This was far more violent than the tremor he’d experienced in the market. It felt as though vast hands had seized the city and were shaking it viciously, side to side, up and down. Felt like the world was ending.
He tried to walk, drunken, lurching steps, the floor juddering and undulating beneath him, tiles rattling, floorboards flexing. The armoire was swaying. A book flew from a shelf to strike him on the shoulder, then one of the shelves broke from the wall, flinging more objects at him. He staggered away to avoid them, arm up to protect his face, a shower of plaster raining down on his head. Jack was almost at the door, when the armoire tipped forward. The great thing swung out into space, like a clumsy dancer reaching for a partner, then crashed down on top of him, slamming him into the floor.
37
Jack came to, his mouth gummed with dust and the copper tang of blood. He stirred slowly, eyes cracking open into blurred darkness.
As he tried to move, pain lanced through him and he sank back with a gasp. Beneath him was something soft. His head was swimming. From somewhere close by came an odd shuffling that conjured images of animals sniffing their way towards him in the black. He tried again to sit, his body shouting with a hundred different voices of pain.
‘Here,’ came a papery voice. A shadow, looming over him. ‘Drink!’
He felt liquid flood his parched mouth, trailing bitter down his throat. He coughed, spitting up bloody water, then seized the vessel and drank, a sudden thirst overwhelming him.
‘Careful now!’
As the man tugged the cup from his hands and helped him sit, Jack realised he was speaking French. The pain in his torso was a solid band, wrapped like armour around his ribs, shooting outwards, bright and sharp as glass, as he breathed. He felt the area tenderly, winced to find every part sore and bruised. Were all his ribs broken?
He focused with difficulty in the gloom and through the pounding in his head, to see the figure stooping awkwardly to sit before him. For a moment, all he saw was an old man, so near death as to be almost skeletal; wisps of white hair floating around a skull-like face, skin grey and wrinkled, spotted with sores, one eye clouded white. Then he saw the withered stump where one of his hands should be, and felt the shock of recognition.
‘Amaury?’ Fear seized him. He’d long ago given up any real hope of finding the priest alive. ‘Am I dead?’ Christ, was this hell? It certainly smelled like it. Rot and urine. Dank despair.
&
nbsp; The old priest chuckled toothlessly. ‘Perhaps!’ His mirth faded. ‘But, no. I think not.’
He looked like an Old Testament hermit, come wandering out of a cave.
As his shock faded, Jack cast his gaze around the space he was in. It looked like a cellar, barrels stacked along the walls, mouldy smells of earth and wine turned to vinegar. There was a door to the left of the heap of tattered blankets he was sitting on and a faint source of light bleeding from somewhere deeper in.
How had he come to be here? His mind struggled to piece together the fragments floating in it. The secret door in the walls between the palazzi. The silver wolves in the coffer. An earthquake. He had been struck, crushed. Those memories were solid, but there were others, strange and formless: voices in a haze of dust, hands on him, a sensation of release, then pain and blackness, the agonising motion of a cart, smell of rain and pine, a tower rising above him, hooves clattering on stone. ‘Where am I? How did I get here?’
‘They brought you. Two days ago.’ Amaury peered at him, a smile cracking his sunken face. ‘I knew you would come, James Wynter. I heard them speak of you sometimes. I knew you would come.’ He sucked in a wheezy breath. ‘Of course, I hoped you might release me, not join me. Still, it is good to have company. Isn’t it?’ he called, addressing the darkness. He waved his hand apologetically when there was no response. ‘Don’t mind them.’
Jack stared at him, not knowing what to say. Had the old man lost his mind? He took in his surroundings again. Had the priest been down here all this time, alone in the dark?
‘As to your other question, young man.’ Amaury clambered upright with a pop of bones. ‘We are under the ground. Come!’
As the priest limped into the shadows, using barrels and crumbling bits of wall to support himself, Jack got to his feet with effort, a hiss escaping his lips at the pain. Pausing to let the swimming in his head subside, he walked unsteadily after him, towards the faint light source, which he realised was coming from above. Things scuttled away from him, darting behind barrels. Rats, he guessed. There were chunks of masonry on the floor, scatterings of dust like ash. A few of the walls were traced with deep cracks. Jack guessed the quake must have happened here too. Where were they? Somewhere beyond the city if his fractured memories were correct.
Amaury pointed to the cellar roof. ‘There!’
Jack could see slivers of bluish light like veins twisting their way across the uneven ceiling. But it wasn’t just rough-hewn stone. There was something strange up there, brown and soft like moss, growing in a jagged line across a small section of the cellar roof. Jack blinked up at it, trying to work it out. There was an awful smell here. Meat spoiling.
Amaury tugged at his sleeve. ‘It got bigger!’ he exclaimed in hushed tones. ‘When the earth shook. I told you it would, my lord!’ he added, grinning sagely, his one good eye flickering somewhere over Jack’s shoulder. He ambled to a nearby barrel. ‘I put them up there, so they wouldn’t see.’ He put a gnarled finger to his lips. ‘Sssshh!’
As he began to heave the barrel closer to the cracks of light, Jack moved to help him, grimacing with the effort.
Amaury made a shooing motion once they had it in place. ‘Up! Up!’
Gritting his teeth, Jack climbed slowly, gingerly on to the barrel. He reached for the roof, then recoiled as his fingers touched something soft and mushy. The smell of putrefaction was overpowering. Then he realised – it wasn’t moss sprouting from the cracks in the stone, but rats, scores of them, their broken bodies stuffed into the gaps through which the daylight was struggling to bleed. ‘Dear God,’ he choked, fighting off a wave of nausea.
‘All day and night, I tempted them out. Bash! Bash!’ Amaury slapped the side of the barrel.
Forcing back his disgust, Jack peered up between the bodies. He could see a slice of deep blue sky – autumn rich – heard the chatter of birds. ‘Where does it go?’
‘Out!’ exclaimed Amaury, peering up at him. ‘The world!’
‘Why didn’t you try to escape?’
‘Too high,’ said the priest, waving his stump. ‘Too high.’ His head jerked suddenly in the direction of the door, eyes narrowing. ‘Down!’ he hissed. ‘Get down!’
Jack jumped from the barrel, stifling a yell at the shock of pain. He helped Amaury shift it away, then both of them struggled back to the blankets, half-leaning on one another, as footfalls descended beyond the door.
Jack collapsed on the blankets, sweat breaking out all over his body. There was a clatter of keys and the door opened. Two men appeared, neither of whom Jack recognised, although each wore a silver wolf badge on his tunic.
One, a dark-haired man, with a jutting jaw and close-set eyes, beckoned to him. ‘Out.’
Jack glanced over at Amaury, who had shrunk behind one of the barrels and was humming a tuneless melody. After a moment, Jack struggled to his feet. The second man entered, impatient at his slowness, seized his arm and marched him through. The last thing Jack saw before the door was shut was the priest, peering out from the barrel, finger to his lips.
The men escorted him up the steps through another door, then out into blazing sunlight, dazzling after the cellar dark. He caught a glimpse of a blocky tower with a red-tiled roof thrusting above a series of other imposing buildings, castle-like in design; orchards and ornamental gardens, outbuildings with forested hills rising up beyond, then he was being thrust into a barn-like structure stacked with more barrels, sacks of grain and shelves of casks and jars, the vaulted roof supported by wooden pillars.
There was a stool placed beside one of the pillars, which he was pushed roughly down on by the man with the jutting jaw, while the other snatched up a length of rope that was used to bind his hands behind the beam, every movement sending pain lancing through his broken ribs. The two men left the storeroom, leaving him sagged on the stool, sweat dripping from his nose. There were fissures in the walls here, too, and a pile of broken pots and jars, swept hastily into a corner. More evidence of the quake? Two days, Amaury said he’d been here. Jack thought of Laora, Ned and the others, prayed they were safe in the city.
The door behind him opened. He twisted painfully at the sound of footsteps and drew a breath at the sight of the approaching figure. It was Marco Valori.
The young man was dressed in black hose and a doublet trimmed with silver braid, on which was fixed his wolf badge, glinting in the sunlight streaming through the store’s high windows. As he came to stand before him, Jack saw he was holding a goblet.
Marco shook his head as he studied him. ‘You look as though you have been through a war, my friend. Here.’ He moved towards him with the goblet. ‘It is wine,’ he assured, as Jack jerked his head away. ‘There,’ he murmured, tilting it carefully into his mouth. ‘Better?’
Jack took a few sips, the wine sweet and cool in his dry mouth. He nodded.
‘Good.’ Marco smiled tightly, then dragged a stool from a corner to sit before him, placing the goblet on the floor between them. ‘So, we find ourselves in an interesting place.’
Jack guessed he didn’t mean the store. He had many questions, but he wanted to wait, see what his friend – if he could still call him that – would tell him of his own accord.
Marco let the silence drag on, then took a breath. ‘I am assuming, given where Fra Giorgio found you, that you must have discovered the passage. Did you tell anyone about it? The signore?’ When Jack didn’t answer, Marco sighed heavily. ‘I want to help you, Jack, truly I do.’
The man had started calling him by the name some months ago, after he’d heard Laora use it. Jack, more and more easy in their friendship, hadn’t stopped him.
‘But, before I can do that, I need some assurances. Some show of good faith.’
‘No,’ Jack said, after a pause. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t have time.’
Marco nodded. ‘It is what we hoped.’
‘And who is we? Fra Giorgio? Amerigo? Lorenzino and Giovanni di’ Pierfrancesco? You? The company? Are y
ou all in this together? Are you all working against the signore?’
If this was true, then the conspiracy reached far deeper than Lorenzo de’ Medici had feared. The signore, although troubled by the Court of Wolves, had nonetheless seen them as a force beyond his immediate sphere: something he could seek to infiltrate and then control – certainly not directly connected to members of his own family. That was something the signore had always refused to countenance when Jack had reeled off lists of potential traitors in his household. It was as if Lorenzo’s eyes were blind to the possibility that someone of his own blood could betray him. As if any member of the House of Medici was beyond reproach.
‘How did you find the passage?’ Marco pressed. ‘Did Franco Martelli tell you of it?’ The man nodded at Jack’s surprise. ‘We know you went to the Stinche. Well,’ he said grimly, when Jack didn’t speak. ‘Martelli won’t be around much longer to talk of things he shouldn’t. He knows the price of betrayal.’
‘How do you know I went to see him? Have you been spying on me too?’
‘Yes.’ Marco’s tone was calm, matter-of-fact. ‘As you have been spying on us. Don’t look so shocked, Jack. It was clear, soon enough, that the signore was using you to get close to us. So we drew you in. Showed you what we wanted you to see. Enough to keep you – and Lorenzo – occupied. Enough to keep your focus on us and away from our masters.’
Jack’s heart was pounding. Now it made sense, why Marco’s early eagerness to know about Lorenzo’s weaknesses had waned: they had known he was a fraud. He struggled through the fog in his mind to think back through the times he’d spent with him and the men of the company – the kick-games and the banquets, the laughter and wine. Had there been signs? Why hadn’t he seen them? ‘When did you know?’
‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens now. You see, Jack, I believed from the beginning that you could be of great use to us, even after we knew your interest in our company was duplicitous. I told our patrons I thought you could be turned to our cause. I saw how frustrated you were with the signore. You tried to hide it, but those evenings in the taverns, at the arena, the drink flowing? It always surprises me how loose men allow their lips to become with this.’ He nudged the goblet with his boot. ‘Englishmen, in particular, seem to have a weakness for it. It is why I drink my wine watered.’