She did this because she felt that she was being punished. In the worst of her grief, she had cried out to God that there was little point in being rich and having fortune and possessions when the one person she loved was taken from her. Well, God had heard her, and had taken her treasure too. Now what?
Oderigo waited for her to compose herself. He was by no means as surprised as the lady of the house appeared at this discovery. He had heard, among the bankers and lawyers in Saronno and Pavia, that Lorenzo di Saronno had pursued his military ambitions in such a way that he was in danger of ruining his own house. A headstrong hot-headed young soldier with an over-developed sense of honour found it more needful to give his horses the best equipage, and his men the finest liveries, than to exercise the prudent, dull exigencies of a lasting income and pension for his estates. Oderigo tutted to himself. Such imprudence was unbelievable to a man of careful finance like himself.
Oderigo was not villainous, merely indifferent to Simonetta’s plight. In his line of work, and in such times as these, he was used to dealing with clients who found themselves in reduced circumstances. He removed the kerchief from his pocket that he carried for these occasions, but when the lady lifted her head he was relieved to see that her eyes were dry. By heaven, she was a fair lady! For the first time in his long career, he felt an alien flicker of sympathy thaw his heart, for never had he seen such an expression of hopelessness on so fair a face. ‘Lady,’ he began. ‘You must not despair. I can buy you a little time. I will quiet your creditors and return in a month. Till then, do everything you can to retrench. Sell whatever you can, reduce the number of your servants; it may yet be possible to remain in this house. But it can be no little adjustment: everything in your power must be done – only the essentials should be left alone.’
Simonetta met his eyes for the first time. The house! It had never occurred to her, in the worst of the last few moments, that she would have to leave the Villa Castello. She could not, would not submit to leaving all that she and Lorenzo had shared, whatever it cost her. She nodded to the notary, and he took his leave, and as he walked the path between the almond trees he relived the thrill of the moment when Simonetta di Saronno had looked him full in the eye.
What a month had she then! What a reduction, a coming down of circumstances! What a difference would Oderigo see when next he walked the almond grove to Castello! Every man and maid who worked on the place was let go, except for her dear Raffaella whom she needed as a friend more than a servant. Gregorio was kept on the place for three reasons – for charity because of his injuries, for his service and strong attachment to her newly dead lord, and for an affection which she saw growing between the squire and Raffaella. Having been rent from her own love, Simonetta could not so part two lovers.
One man and one maid would have to do. Each day Simonetta walked the villa’s rooms with Raffaella, determining what chests, what fine draperies, what paintings could be sold. Together they went through Simonetta’s closets. Jewels, furs, gowns from happier times were all to be sold. The great tapestry that covered one whole wall of the dining solar, which depicted in wondrous detail the doomed love of Lancelot and Guinevere, was taken from its poles. Simonetta ran her hands over the exquisite stitching as she folded the cloth for sale. She had loved the scene: the passionate embrace of the guilty queen and her shining knight with the shadowy figure of Arthur looking on, and the white conical towers of Camelot set in the hills behind like a shining crown. Lorenzo’s clothes too, untouched since he had worn them, would also go. Simonetta did not allow herself to bury her face in the scent of his linens or remember that she had felt, hard, warm muscle within this velvet sleeve as she leant on his arm or the breadth of his back under that fur as they danced. Dry eyed, she disposed of all, save for his russet hunting garb, and that she kept for a special purpose.
For now there was no money for meat, Simonetta began to hone her skills with the bow. The sport that she had enjoyed as a diversion, a skill befitting to a great lady, now became as needful to her as to the poorest serf. Hour after hour she spent at her chamber window – not weeping now, but firing arrows with increasing accuracy at the almond trees. As her skill improved she left the trunks alone – by now as barbed as Saint Sebastian – and painted a single nut with red clay to become her target. She painted the almonds hanging further and further away from the house until she was a true proficient. Her skill was sharpened by the fantasy that she was shooting Spanish soldiers, and sometimes, secretly, that artist fellow who she could not forget. That for his silver eyes, that for his dark curls, that for his maddening white grin that haunted her – torturing her with the remembrance that it had warmed her where she had thought she would be cold forever. Sometimes she thought of him as she walked the woods, dressed in Lorenzo’s shabby hunting garb, setting snares and dispatching the rabbits she caught. She felt a ruthless enjoyment as she found the creatures struggling as they strangled themselves. She took the skins and the stomachs from them with newly learned skill. As the gouts of warm blood ran over her white hands, she revelled in angry pleasure and her heart hardened within her. Like the pagan soothsayers she read her own fate in the entrails. That that had beat warm and strong was now clotted and cold. She straightened and looked back across the parkland. Glittering frost rimed the almond trees like powdered diamonds, and the low winter sun gave the plaster of the villa a rosy blush. She looked at the elegant, square building with the last remnants of her affection. God had taken her love from her; she would not let him take her house too.
She took to wearing Lorenzo’s hunting garb at all times. She kept only one gown – her wedding dress of green orefois – and never wore it once. She resembled a boy as she strode through the woods, more so now because of her greatest sacrifice. As she trod the dead, red leaves of autumn she remembered the night when Raffaella had cut off her hair – the shears whispering in her ears that she would never be fair again. She had gathered the red skeins from the floor and wrapped them in tissue to be sold to Florence where red hair was the fashion for wigs and pieces. She cared not. She reacted against the beauty that she had, she was gladdened when her white hands became calloused, glad that her crowning glory had gone. She took a last look in her silver-backed looking glass the day before it was sold, saw the hair that stubbornly insisted on curling prettily above her shoulders and round her face, but rejoiced that he would never ask to paint her again.
Her board had little to recommend it now. Nightly meals of rabbit or squirrel, with the few roots she found in the woods, were her comfort. In better days, when the ornamental rose gardens and yew walks of Castello had been planted, it would never have occurred to her or Lorenzo that they might be better served by their acres by planting vegetables. In the evening she sat huddled over the meagre firewood that Gregorio had chopped, and sang unaccompanied the airs she used to play on her lute before it had gone to be sold. When she felt her eyes drop from the exercise of the day she went to her chamber and rolled in the one fur cloak she had kept. She slept directly on the stone floor, for the fine wooden box-frame bed of English oak, the bed where she had spent her wedding night, was gone. The autumn winds whistled through the windows unchecked, for the Venetian glass roundels which they had fitted there were gone too. Most nights she slept from sheer exhaustion, but on the last day of the month she was wakeful, for she knew she had not enough money to give to Oderigo on the morrow.
Shocked by the change in the villa and its lady, Oderigo was obliged to seat himself on a log by the hearth for both board and bench had gone. Simonetta was not alone today, but flanked by Raffaella and Gregorio, ready to plead for their lady or protect her if Oderigo became angry. He counted the coins she gave him in silence. He did not need to tell her that there were not enough. He indulged himself with a look at her face. She was thinner, harder, but no less beautiful. The change in her demeanour was great, greater than the change that the loss of her hair and the change in her garb had wrought. If he thought her fine when he left her las
t time, his reflections would be no less great today. She spoke first.
‘Signore,’ she said with her new confidence, ‘I will not leave this place. What can I do more? Tell me, where am I to seek help? What am I to do? I am ready.’
Oderigo opened his mouth but then thought better of it. He knew of one who would help her, but was reluctant, as a Christian, to send her in his path. He shook his head to himself, but she saw it all.
‘What? Who?’ she questioned with urgency. She came to the notary and took his arm. ‘I know you can help me. Tell me where I can find succour, for the love of God!’
He sighed. ‘Lady, I do know of one who can help you. But he will not do it through the love of your God, or mine, or any that we know. His name is Manodorata.’
Simonetta heard Raffaella gasp, and saw her maid sink to the floor and throw her apron over her head. She turned to Gregorio, who rapidly crossed his breast as his lips muttered a prayer. Puzzled, not understanding, Simonetta turned back to Oderigo.
‘Manodorata? Who is he? Can he help me?’
‘He can help you, Lady.’
‘Then why do you all shrink? What manner of man is he? Am I to petition the Devil himself?’
Oderigo would not meet her eyes this time. ‘Very like, my Lady. He is a Jew.’
CHAPTER 7
Manodorata
There was a star cut into the door. A curious star with six points, designed as if two triangles had been offset, rotated to leave their points exposed. Simonetta had never seen such a thing, and for a moment her fears left her to be replaced by curiosity as her fingers traced the deep grooves in the heavy oaken door. She might have felt much at this moment, for since her interview with Oderigo Beccaria that very morning she had been given much to think about. She had had to endure the voices of her maid and squire, combined in chorus to condemn the man who lived in this house, and all his race.
Simonetta had ever been a religious girl – she had been devout until this last month when she had stayed away from Santa Maria dei Miracoli. She told herself that she had been absent from the church because she grieved too greatly for Lorenzo, that she was too occupied with the economies of her household, even that she hated God for taking her husband. She never admitted, even to herself, that she was afraid of seeing him again.
Simonetta had no intention of turning her back on God forever. It was only that she could not think of him, not praise him, just now. She felt she had little to give thanks for, and much to pray for, but she felt that the Lord had done with listening to her. But according to her servants, she now stood in danger of losing her Christian soul forever, just by consorting with a Jew.
Never had she heard such condemnation, such censure. Never had she heard such bitter words fall from the lips of her beloved maid, and her mild-mannered squire. For the Jews were apparently demons. The men were warlocks, the women witches. They were hideously deformed, as a punishment for the death of Christ, for which they were directly responsible. The genitals for both men and women were the same – they could not mate as God intended, nor give birth in the natural way; but spat their babes from their mouths in bloody sacs. They drank blood and feasted on the flesh of Christian babes. They could not feel the warmth of the sun and walked in darkness but never in daylight. They were skilled in the dark arts and could bewitch and curse good Christians until they sickened and died. They used their arts to accrue great wealth, which they bled from good God fearing folk.
This then, was what Simonetta was to expect. But there was more. The man she was to visit, to plead for money, was the worst of the lot. He was a creature of darkness indeed. He had the face of a Devil and the body of a bear. He spoke in an evil tongue and took the livelihoods of good hardworking men and women. And he literally wore his wealth on his sleeve, for he had a golden hand (‘solid gold!’ said Raffaella) which had the power to kill at a touch. This member had given him the name by which he was known: ‘Manodorata’ or ‘golden hand’. Better to quit the house altogether than to feed Castello with his bloody gold. Even if he helped them the place would be ruined in a matter of months anyway, because of the usurious practices of the Jews that were strictly banned in the Bible. The interest would be crippling.
So said Raffaella and Gregorio as they pleaded with their mistress not to put herself in the clutches of the Jew. And yet she knew she had to go. She would not know how to leave Castello, to start again. Where could she go? What could she do? The plague had taken her family, and Lorenzo’s too. And besides, as she made her way to Jews’ Street in Saronno she began to feel strongly that, unfortunate as her circumstances were, the fight was what was keeping her going. This survival instinct, that she had not known she had, was the only opposition to her other temptation, which was to end it all by falling on Lorenzo’s sword. If the Jew wanted to eat her alive, let him. If her Christian God could not help her, very well. Let the other side try.
She took her fingers from the star and knocked at the door – hard enough to graze her knuckles. She hoped, and then feared, that there was no one within. But at length, the ornamental grille set into the door above the star slid open and a pair of eyes appeared. Simonetta cleared her throat and said what she had been instructed. ‘My name is Simonetta di Saronno, and I am here on the business of Oderigo Beccaria.’
The grille slid shut and she was about to despair of entry when the door creaked open. She was met by the owner of the eyes, a lady wearing a purple robe and golden jewellery more costly than the ones she herself had sold. Simonetta took her for the lady of the house until the woman ushered her within. Simonetta marvelled as she followed the maid through cool courtyards where fountains played, through ornamental arches and between tall slim pillars. Everything was coloured and patterned with strange but regular shapes, but to a tasteful, not gaudy, effect. It was warm in the house, for all that it was so great, and a spicy incense hung in the air. It was all so alien and opulent and very seductive. She had headed into something rich and strange indeed.
Simonetta began to fear again, as the stories of her servants returned, and she felt that she was walking into the lion’s mouth. But she saw a sight to revive her spirits – through an archway to her left she spied two small blonde boys playing with their nursemaid. The lady wore three long dark plaits and a scarlet robe, and was rolling a silver ball between the little boys. The ball held a bell within, and the laughter of the boys echoed its tinkling sound. Simonetta smiled at the scene. The laughter of children, and the tender look on the nursemaid’s face, gave her courage. It seemed the Jews loved their children too.
The fear returned as she was led deeper into the house and she perceived a figure seated at a tavola writing with a quill. Simonetta’s notion that she had truly entered another world was only compounded when her nervous brain registered that the figure was writing in a ledger from right to left, not from left to right in the Christian manner. Nor were the black characters like any that she had been taught by the good sisters of the Pisan convent that directed her education. The fellow’s bulk seemed massive as he leant over his work, and he wore a berretto all’antica in the Milanese style, the velvet of the hat obscuring his face. Was this, then, the Devil she had come to dance with? Yes, for the maidservant ushered her into a chair of gold filigree opposite the figure. He continued to direct the quill with a hand that looked the same as most men’s – and his bulk was an illusion in that he wore a heavy fur cloak indoors, but Simonetta began to dread what she would see when he looked up. At length Manodorata laid his pen aside and raised his head to his visitor. He had not, after all, the face of the Devil, but yet there was something to fear. His eyes were a cold grey that flickered with fearsome intelligence. His lips were unusually full, but were set in a dangerous line. At a time when the fashion was for a clean-shaven face he wore a beard that was oiled and cut into a point as sharp as a knife. His hair and beard were dark but his face looked old – he could have been fifty or more. When he spoke it was in fluent Milanese, but in accents which betr
ayed that his tongue was accustomed to another language altogether.
‘You have business to transact for my friend Beccaria? But I may not call him a friend; nor yet a foe. He may as likely spit at me as ask me for money. He has not yet decided where he stands with me. Like most Christians he thinks that business is a dirty word. So I suspect you have come on your own account.’
Simonetta was disconcerted at being seen through so soon. She could see there was little point in trifling with the Jew. ‘I have come to ask for help,’ she said simply.
‘Then you have wasted your time. And mine.’ Manodorata took up his quill again, and motioned for his maidservant to show his visitor out. Simonetta stood up and, as the quill began to scratch, spoke urgently. ‘Please. I may lose my house.’
‘I can see you are not accustomed to pleading. The trick is to appeal to something that I actually care about. Try again.’
‘I lost my husband.’
‘Better, but not good enough.’
Simonetta hung her head and exhaled a deep breath as if it were her last. She spoke in a low tone, almost to herself. ‘Then it is decided. I am done for. The Spanish may as well have killed me too.’
The quill stopped. ‘The Spanish?’
The Madonna of the Almonds Page 5