‘Indeed. She attends mass here every week – I myself married her here. It is the nearest church to her home.’
‘Which is where?’
Anselmo shook his tonsured head. ‘I will not tell you that. You must leave her be.’
But Luini was already making his way down the nave to the Lady Chapel. He needed a closer look. Anselmo followed him and plucked at his sleeve. ‘Signore, you must not approach her now! When we pray, we are talking to God.’
Bernardino shook off the hand. ‘She can talk to him later.’
She was kneeling next to a woman whom he supposed to be her maid. The lady was clothed in black and wore a veil, but of such thin stuff that he could see the gleam of her red hair through the net. She prayed not with her head bowed but with her face raised to the votive statue of the Virgin. Her hands, pressed together closely, were long and white; but her face! He had been right – she had the countenance of an angel which far surpassed anything he had ever created even in his finest hours. His heart began to thump. He must paint her. Bernardino sat down in the pew in front of her and hissed urgently: ‘Signora!’
He saw the maid jump and cross herself, but the young mistress simply turned her eyes on him. They were as blue as the waters of Lake Maggiore, where the village of his childhood – Luino – was placed. Never had he loved the lake so well as now, when he could compare it with her eyes. Her face had no animation, her expression was numb, but the serenity of her countenance did nothing to dim her beauty. ‘Signore?’ she said. Her tones were low and musical, but her mien icy. She could not be more than, what, seventeen? But such carriage, such composure! Making no attempt to lower his voice, Bernardino said, ‘Signora, I wish you to sit for me. I want to paint you.’
He now had all of her attention. Simonetta had come here for a miracle, and the Virgin had sent her this? A man, perhaps forty years old or more, repellently handsome, and making a request of her that she did not understand. Was this another test? What could the Queen of Heaven mean by it? ‘Paint…me?’
By this time, Anselmo had caught up to them, for his girth and robes had hampered his progress down the nave. ‘I apologise for this man, my Lady. He is an artist,’ (‘a Great Artist!’ put in Bernardino, to be ignored by everyone) ‘lately come to paint the walls of this church, and if I understand him rightly his impertinent request is that you should… model – for one of the figures.’
‘Not just one of the figures,’ put in Bernardino. ‘The main figure. The Virgin herself,’ and to give emphasis to his point, he slapped a nearby statue of that sacred Lady with a friendly pat on the rear.
Simonetta di Saronno had heard enough. She swept out of the church followed closely by Raffaella. She did not like the man’s tone, or his irreverence to the Virgin, but there was something more. She had made the mortifying discovery that she was, despite her grief, susceptible to his considerable physical charms. No remembrance of how long she had been without Lorenzo in her bed could absolve her of this sin. She felt jolted and guilty and resolved to atone for long hours before her prie-dieu at home, where he was not. She did not hear the apologies of Father Anselmo, but she did hear the parting shot of her tormentor. He actually stood on the steps of the church and shouted at her retreating back: ‘I’ll pay you!’
Anselmo dragged Luini back from the doorway. ‘Don’t be foolish! She is one of the richest ladies in Lombardy! She does not need your money!’
‘Everybody needs money,’ said Bernardino, his eyes on the retreating figure. ‘Speaking of which…’ he let the priest lead him back into the interior and explain the terms of the commission.
‘For each single figure of the Saints you will receive twenty-two francs per day.’
‘Want plenty of Saints, eh?’ asked Bernardino, with a cynical curl of his lip. ‘Add a bit of drama, don’t they? Hearts and eyes and breasts torn from the pious body like so much canonised offal.’
‘Indeed,’ said the priest, unmoved. ‘Yet the faithful identify with their suffering, especially at this time. They pray to them for intercession, name their children after them, even invoke them when they curse. They are woven into the tapestry of our lives. In Lombardy, the Saints walk amongst us everyday.’
‘What does that actually mean?’
Anselmo sighed and turned away beginning to move down the aisle. ‘If you don’t know now, someday you will.’
Bernardino followed, his business not concluded. ‘How about room and board?’
The priest turned back. ‘I am instructed to say that wine and bread is included, and lodging here in the bell tower of the church.’ Anselmo’s voice warmed with pride. ‘You’ll be very comfortable. The campanile is fairly new, ’twas built from a benefice given in 1516, and is considered one of the finest in the area.’
Bernardino was not listening. ‘Good. For that money I’ll do you a free Nativity.’
Anselmo tried not to smile. He decided it would be pointless to show Bernardino his pride and joy, the fragment of the True Cross contained in a great ruby-paned reliquary in the apse. He too disliked Luini’s irreverent ways; but could not help liking his person. And the man could paint. Anselmo had seen Luini’s ‘Christ Crowned with Thorns’ while at seminary in Milan – in fact he had first recognised Bernardino, as he entered the church this morning, because the artist had, with customary arrogance, painted Christ’s figure in his own image. Bernardino may look Godly, but Anselmo knew him by repute to be a man of little faith and low morals. It was apt that his friends and fellow artists had made a play on Luini’s name and birthplace of Luino to nickname him lupino – the wolf. Luini even signed himself with the Latin tag ‘lovinus’ on occasion. Anselmo sighed inwardly and hoped that Bernardino would not be trouble. He returned to his theme. ‘How long will so many frescoes take?’
Luini rubbed his chin. ‘I’m a quick worker. I did a ‘Christ Crowned with Thorns’ for the Collegio in thirty-eight days, and that had one hundred and fourteen figures.’ He revolved around under the vaulted ceiling, admiring as he did so the architecture of the interior – it was a lovely confection of a church, all white plaster and delicate mouldings. A few attempts had been made by anonymous artists to paint the pilasters and panels with biblical scenes, but these would be nothing to the frescoes that he would now paint. He laid one hand on a cold white pillar. He always liked to think of his churches as living things. This one was definitely female, with its pretty white iced interior, delicate belltower and tree lined cloister. The stone of the pillar warmed under his hand in welcome and he began to strafe his palm up and down, as if stroking the thigh of one of his willing conquests. ‘Get ready,’ he said beneath his breath, as if to a woman. With a sudden association of ideas he looked to the great empty wall at the narthex of the church. ‘At this end,’ he declared, ‘shall be a great scene of the Adoration of the Magi. The scene shall centre on the Virgin, with Simonetta di Saronno as my model.’ He said the name he would never forget.
Anselmo shook his head at Luini’s persistence. ‘She’ll never agree to it.’
Bernardino smiled, white teeth flashing like the wolf of his nickname. ‘We’ll see.’
CHAPTER 5
The Landscape of Lombardy
Nonna and Amaria worked by candlelight. In this they were fortunate, for the wildman’s appearance by daylight would have been hard indeed to look upon. The candlelight was merciful. It turned blood-red to treacle-black. It hid the green tinges of gangrenous skin, and gilded the sickly yellow pallor of the flesh beneath the matted hair. It turned to gold the lice and fleas that crawled in the hair, and hid the veinous mapping of the bloodshot eyes to leave only the kindly gleam of life.
They had laid the wildman, or Selvaggio as they had dubbed him, on their humble board, which Amaria padded with straw for his comfort. She built up the fire with the faggots she had brought from the forest, and heated a pail of water on its embers. Then they began.
They were obliged to cut the clothes from his flesh with Nonna’s sewing she
ars. Selvaggio watched them, and never uttered a sound, but at length, as the cloth stuck to his wounds and the skin itself began to pull away, he lost consciousness from the pain. Amaria dampened the clothes with water to ease their parting. She threw the pestilent smottered garments on the fire. But round Selvaggio’s trunk was wound a fine dark cloth – by the candlelight it seemed black in colour, but it seemed to be some sort of pennant so Nonna set it by to be cleaned, in case he should want it. The pennant had clearly been used to staunch the blood of the severest wound – a gash so deep that Amaria gasped, and Nonna wondered that it had not killed him. Yet this was the only gash he carried – the other punctures in his flesh were not slashes but holes – a rash of round wounds in his chest and shoulders, as round as arrow holes with the arrows gone, and yet smaller, much smaller. Nonna crossed herself and called on Saint Sebastian, a Saint who knew the pierce of an arrow or two. She looked closer, covering her face with a barm cloth lest she breathe pestilence into the fellow. Peeping from one of the punctures was a round metal pea. She eased it out and it rolled from the flesh, dropping with a neat click on the wooden boards on which the wildman lay. Both women leant close.
‘What is it?’ breathed Amaria.
‘Shot,’ replied Nonna, the syllable itself as short and sharp as gunfire. ‘Pallottola di Piombo. We are in a new world indeed.’ She held the metal up to the firelight where it gleamed evilly – a beady metal eye. She eyed it back. She had learned much of warfare since she had watched Filippo burn – she kept her eyes and ears open as the mercenaries and soldiers had passed through town. ‘Tiny cannon balls shot from cannon that a man can hold. Called a hackbutt, or arquebus. Many, many died this way, this time.’
Nonna took the bowl from Amaria and tipped the water on the rushes. It was not suitable that a maid should touch the flesh of a man, even such a case as he, so this task was hers. She heated the blade of Filippo’s dagger in the fire and began to dig.
Amaria gasped. ‘What are you doing?’
Nonna did not look up. ‘These beans must be taken from his flesh. They are made from an alloy of lead and will poison his organs if left.’
Amaria rolled the first ball in her hand. ‘It is perfectly round,’ she marvelled. ‘How are such things created?’
‘They are made everywhere now. Even here in Pavia.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. The two red towers near Saint Michele’s church, you know the ones?’
Amaria nodded. ‘Yes. The Devil’s legs. You must run between the two as fast as you can with your eyes shut lest the Devil shit on your head.’
Nonna allowed herself a smile at Amaria’s nonsense, even at such a time. ‘Yes, the Gambe del Diavolo. There. These are made there. The Devil shits bullets now.’
‘Truly?’ Amaria’s eyes were wide.
Nonna kept digging through the tender flesh. Some were near the surface, some deeper in. ‘No, child. Like most evils, these are made by men. Hot lead is dropped from the top of the tower to the floor below. When it falls, as water does, the droplets become perfectly round in the air. By the time they reach the floor they are dry, and hard as Christ’s nails.’ She sighed. ‘Most of those that died at Pavia were shot through.’ She fell silent as she pulled the metal from the wildman’s torn muscle. The wound clustered on the white wastes of his flesh like battle sites littered across Lombardy, across the whole peninsula. As she searched the landscape of his body for more of the insidious shot, Nonna named the battles like a litany. She dropped the bullets into the dish with an attendant click for each. She began with Garigliano, the place where she had lost Filippo. Click. Agnadello. Click. Cerignola. Click. Bicocca, Fornovo, Ravenna. Click, click, click. Marignano, Novara. The Siege of Padua. And last of all, the Battle of Padova. The war had come home from far away to their very doorstep. Click. The bullets dropped into the clay dish like the Virgin’s tears and lay there clustered together in a string – the beads of a bloody rosary. Nonna bowed her head for a moment in sorrow for all the battles and all the dead.
Then she took the shears and asked the girl to turn her back as she snipped back dead yellow flesh from the lips of the gash – this was the hacked maw of a sword, for sure. She handed Amaria the shears to clean and her granddaughter then used them to attack Selvaggio’s hair. Amaria cut great clumps away until his hair was all of a length. She washed it then with water and lemon to clear the lice away, and as she cut the fruit to squeeze it on his scalp he seemed to revive. His eyelids flickered – perhaps from the sting of the juice for there were sores on his scalp – and she felt moved to whisper an apology as the eyes closed again. Nonna took her bone needle and waxed thread and sewed the cleaned gash as best she could. She had heard of such remedies on the battlefield and they made sense to her. Sewing was part of her lexicon. If something was torn or rent, you sewed it closed. Nonna clung to her homespun sense through these moments of horror – she needed something to make sense in this world gone mad – where a young man was peppered with blades and shot. As she sewed she tried to imagine his skin was the cambric of a cushion cover, and that she sewed to stop the flock escaping, not the viscera of his stomach.
Amaria had an easier task – she whetted Filippo’s knife on the hearthstone and cut away the beard that covered the savage’s face. As she rubbed olive oil into his skin and began to shave him close, she felt a shock at the warmth of his skin and the roughness of the stubble, for she had never touched a man before. She had had no bearded kiss of a father to remember, or muscular embrace of a brother. It was all new, so new and good that her face heated in the firelight, and her heart sounded in her ears. Her ministrations revealed a face with regular, good features and a refined look that was far away from the savagery of the invalid’s name. Nonna glanced up when the beard was gone and saw him to be young. So young. She had imagined him to be another Filippo, but she knew as she worked that the wildman was little more than a boy – more of an age of a grandson than a son to her.
At length Amaria began to cut Selvaggio’s claw-like nails. When they were clipped away she washed the hands and rubbed in aloes for their wounds and blisters. She noted that the left hand – but for its wounds – was fine and soft, but the right had the calloused palm of an accustomed soldier who carried a sword every day. Nonna dressed the wounds of Selvaggio with a salve she had made of sage in hog fat, and poured wine into the deepest wounds before its application. The two women worked quietly, murmuring to each other occasionally over what was best to be done, revolving around the body as the hours passed. The candles and the laid-out body reminded Nonna of a wake, and she knew that their work may end as such, for his wounds were so heavy, and some infected, that he still may not see dawn.
She felt at least that, even should he die, she had done what she could not do for her son. She had cleaned his wounds and laid him out, and finally she covered the boy in a clean linen coverlet and left him to sleep, the sleep of refreshment and recovery, or of death and despair. But as the grey light lessened the powers of the candles, the eyelids flickered again, and a bloom returned to the thin sallow face that had not been there before. In the daylight, with all wounds hidden, the case did not look as grave as before. They allowed themselves to hope. He did not rave or fever, his skin was not fiery to the touch, nor his colour hectic. They could now fully see his face; the eyes, as they opened, were the green of basil leaves, and the hair the light straight brown of merlin feathers. As he slept, grandmother and granddaughter embraced as they watched him, and then crept from the room up the stairs of the cot to the dormer they shared, to sleep also. But before they slept both of them shed tears; Nonna for what she had lost, and Amaria for what she had found.
CHAPTER 6
The Notary
Simonetta di Saronno had her head in her hands. Those long white hands, with the middle fingers all of a length, concealed her face completely. She had thought that she had reached the bottom of her well of despair, but had now been plummeted to new depths by the man who sat opposite
her, across the massive bare board of her great hall.
She was not weeping though. And the man that sat with her was not Bernardino Luini, whatever appearances might be. In fact she had tried hard to forget that impossible man, and had almost managed to dispel his face from her waking hours. Her dreams, however, he penetrated against her wishes, and her prayers were all the more fervent in the morning.
No, the gentleman was a notary – Oderigo Beccaria, a man of middle years who had tended to the di Saronno fortune in many hours of private counsel once a month, closeted with Lorenzo. Simonetta had not realised the littleness of her own plight to others so it was salutary to her to note that Oderigo turned up on the first of the month, with his quill and his ledger, as if Lorenzo had never died. She had not known that she, a woman who had never had to think about anything beyond the colour of her gown and the dressing of her hair, would now have to become intimately acquainted with her own household accounts.
The household accounts, it seemed, were not in a healthy state. Oderigo told her, in no uncertain terms, that her tradesmen had not been paid, nor the servants, from the provision that remained from Lorenzo; a provision which that lord had left him to transact the accounts in what he was sure would be a short absence. Simonetta, at this stage in the conversation, was not unduly concerned. Smarting from her loss, she tired of this financial chatter and heartily wished Oderigo away so that she might mourn unchecked. She took the three bronze keys from her belt and went downstairs to the almond cellar. As always, she made sure she was not observed as she made her way to the back of the room, feeling the nutshells crack under her feet, and felt in the dark for the three keyholes that would unlock the room which held the di Saronno treasure. She was confident as she turned the keys in their proper order, that she would find what she needed within. Even when the first coffer she unlocked – with the cognizance of the three silver almonds on blue painted on the lid – proved empty, she merely moved to the next. Only when every coffer proved to be empty did she return upstairs, sit down and put her head in her hands.
The Madonna of the Almonds Page 4