Signora Da Vinci

by Maxwell, Robin

  “You are the jewel of Florence and the queen of all of our hearts.” Then he stood and gently placed the crown into the riot of her golden curls.

  The crowd cheered again.

  “What a lucky woman to be getting such a fine husband!” I had to shout over the noise to be heard by Benito.

  “What do you mean?!” he shouted back. “That is not Lorenzo’s betrothed. She is Lucrezia Donati, the most beautiful and beloved woman in Florence!”

  “Where is his wife-to-be!?” I was very confused.

  “She is on her way here from Rome! Clarice Orsini is her name. It’s a very noble family, but the match is not very popular with Florentines! Romans are well known for their pride and snobbery! But the alliance brings soldiers and several great estates with it! And a six-thousand-florin dowry. Six thousand!”

  The racket had lessened again, for Lorenzo was now singing to the newly crowned queen. There was a smile behind that voice of his, the odd amalgam of gruffness and gentility—the smile because the words he sang were bawdy and outrageous. But far from the crowd being shocked or dismayed by his verse, it seemed to make them love Lorenzo more.

  “Don’t tell me,” I whispered to Benito, “he composed the song himself.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Is there anything that Lorenzo de’ Medici does not do splendidly?”

  “If there is, I cannot think of it.”

  The song finished, the bearers heaved the throne on their shoulders and Lorenzo, throwing back his red-rosed scarf and cape, mounted his charger in one graceful sweep. I could tell he would soon be out of sight, and I wished to see him one more time.

  With more brazenness than I thought I had in me I pushed forward to the edge of the purple carpet. Oncoming was Lorenzo, followed by the crowd and enthroned queen.

  But I had, in my enthusiasm, perhaps jostled a stocky Florentine lad too hard, for now with a grimace in my direction he jostled me back. I was unused to roughhousing like young men regularly do, and I was caught off balance. With my scholar’s cap flying off my head, I fell unceremoniously into the middle of the purple carpet flat on my back, right in the path of Lorenzo’s charger.

  Before I could spring to my feet I found myself staring up into the face of the Medici heir. He was smiling a dazzling smile, and his hand reached down to pull me up.

  I lifted my arm and his strong hand gripped mine. I was on my feet in the next moment. I snatched my cap and placed it back on my head. Lorenzo, with a grin, straightened it for me. The crowd was delighted by this little scene. The great Lorenzo helping the hapless young scholar with grace and good humor.

  Then with a wave to the queen’s bearers that he was moving again, Lorenzo rode back for the loggia, where his mother and father were standing with Giuliano, waiting for him to join them, completing the Medici family tableau.

  I stepped back and felt myself lost amidst the masses. I was aware of Benito speaking to me, tugging at my arm.

  “Cato! He pulled you up! Straightened your cap! Acknowledged you!” The boy began dusting off my tunic, as though he was the servant of a fine gentleman. I noticed that many eyes were fixed on me, as though I had been blessed by God himself.

  “I’m all right, really I am,” I said to Benito, wishing for him to stop his fussing. “Tell me, is that food I smell?”

  “Food? You think you smell food?” His whole face lit up and I was reminded suddenly of Leonardo and the insatiable appetite my son quite suddenly acquired the year he turned thirteen. “I will show you food!”

  Benito began moving through the crowd to the perimeter of the square. “Stay close so we don’t lose each other again!”

  Now we had reached the edge of the piazza, where, to my further astonishment in a day of unending astonishments, was a long row of tables, each covered with a colorful tent and piled high with some Tuscan delicacy being served by a smiling Florentine woman. Separating each table was a barrel of wine and a vintner hawking the fruit of his vines.

  There was nothing an Italian was more proud of than his wine, unless, of course, you counted his olive oil. But the oil was a given, used in every dish, in potions and poultices, and preserves and even to lubricate the skin. My father used to say, “Cut a Tuscan’s vein and out is just as likely to pour wine or oil as blood.”

  “Food indeed,” I said to Benito.

  “What did you expect?” said Benito. “How can it be a festival without a feast?”

  We walked down the row of tables deciding what we wished to eat first.

  “And I suppose this was all provided by . . .”

  “Look around you, Cato,” the boy said rather dramatically. So I did as I was told. “There is not a single thing you can see, hear, taste, or smell in this whole piazza that has not been imagined, created, or paid for by Lorenzo.”

  My eyes had fallen on the canopy beneath the Signoria’s loggia.

  The core of the Medici dynasty stood together. The ruler’s frail arms were slung over the shoulders of his two sons, of whom he seemed very proud. Then Lorenzo picked up his mother’s hand, and with adoring eyes kissed the tips of her fingers. The scene tightened my throat, but what I saw next was like a sharp stake thrust into my belly.

  Talking with the head of the Notaries Guild was Leonardo’s father, Piero da Vinci.

  Of course I knew that in moving to Florence there would be no way to avoid seeing him. He was a respected lawyer, “a notable notary,” Leonardo had quipped in one of his letters.

  I had determined to stay as far away from Piero as possible, as he was the one person most likely to recognize my identity. True, he had seen me almost never in the past ten years. I had grown from the girl he had seduced into a mature, work-hardened woman. Piero himself had seen less and less of Vinci in the years after Leonardo’s birth, coming more often and finally moving to Florence, where his aspirations and ambitions could take flight.

  It was possible, I concluded, that Piero might stare me right in the face and never know it was his once-young, once-beloved sweetheart. When I felt my guts beginning to churn I knew I should leave. I found Benito at a table serving quail pastries. His cheeks were stuffed with the delicacy and his eyes were watering—it must have been spiced with hot peppers.

  “I’m going back to my house,” I said. “I must at least make up a place where I can sleep before tonight. I’ve not even been up my stairs yet.”

  “Do you want me to come help you?” he asked with his mouth full. It was comical to see, but it was a sweet gesture of sacrifice from a boy I had met only hours before.

  “Don’t be silly,” I called back to him. “Stay and enjoy the food.”

  “And dancing!” he shouted at my back as if to entice me.

  I was tempted to say with a touch of sarcasm, “I suppose Lorenzo de’ Medici choreographed the dances, too.” Later I found out that he had.

  I climbed the stairs that clung to the east wall of my house, finding them thankfully sturdy, and also found, to my surprise and delight, a reasonably intact and less than filthy sitting room on the first floor. There were two large windows in the front, which, when uncovered, looked down on the street, and a good-sized hearth on the back wall that looked down on my garden. From here I watched the mule busily clearing the brush, chewing contentedly and seeming completely at home in this new yard.

  On the second floor I found what had been used as a kitchen, and a bedroom complete with an Italian’s most prized possession—a family-sized bed with wooden canopy. There was no bedding, just a frame, and the dust in there was so thick that when I placed a single foot in the room a cloud of it rose up around me.

  One more flight up I found, on the street side, a smaller chamber that once might have been used for a bedroom, but had since been converted by the elder Bracciolini to a study. There was an unremarkable desk—but one I was mightily pleased to see—and a wall of shelves that must have held books. I smiled, suddenly feeling more at home here, for the place reminded me of my father’s house.
Not all men had studies. Fewer still owned books.

  There was a history of scholarship in the house. And a link with my father. Perhaps some of the volumes that had graced these shelves had been acquired or first copied by Poggio and Papa on one of their adventures, and brought as a gift to Poggio’s father, my father’s master.

  But the greatest delight was yet to come. Across a tiny landing from the study I found a closed door. This bore a padlock, but it was so rusted that a blow with my broom handle pulled it off, hinges and all.

  Papa had told me that my new home had once hidden a laboratory, for old Bracciolini, aside from his work in the herbal arts, had been an alchemist. He’d been Ernesto’s teacher in both. So when the door creaked open and I beheld that most heretical of all chambers, I felt a thrill of delight, though not surprise.

  There was little left of its equipment for an untrained eye to recognize the room’s purposes. But I could tell. It had been placed on the top floor facing the garden, the most private room in the house. There was a lingering smell of sulfur and the sharp bite of mercury that permeated the walls and floor. The long tables were stained and burned in the same way my father’s laboratory tables had been. And there, on the far wall, was the furnace—not a normal hearth or a brazier to give heat on a chilly evening. This was a proper fire-and-brimstone oven, one that once lit was tended constantly, with sacred fervor . . . and never ever let to burn out.

  By now I had lost the sun and I was forced to carefully feel my way down the dark stairway to the ground floor and find a lamp to light. By its glow alone I swept and mopped my bedchamber, being careful to remove every last spiderweb and rat dropping from the bedstead, and finally with some trepidation carried up a thin mattress, sheets, coverlets, and pillow to lay in its boards. The moment the bed was made exhaustion overtook me, and barely able to remove my outer clothes, I collapsed there and fell deeply asleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the next weeks my new young friend Benito was good to his word and helped me with the cleaning and refurbishing of the first two floors of my house. Of the rest he saw nothing. I had clandestinely carted all of my books and alchemical equipment to the third floor. The bedrooms, too, I determined to keep private.

  The boy worked cheerfully, this being his nature, but also because having secured my services to his family in exchange for his work he had, indeed, raised his currency with them.

  Wearing kerchiefs over our faces we disposed of the most disgusting tasks first, cleaning the storeroom and shop of their ingrained filth, tearing out walls and floorboards that were rotted away, concealing years of black mold. Benito was a more than adequate carpenter and replaced the rotten planks with wood donated by his father, the overage from a shed he had recently built in their garden.

  I took special pride in my large glazed front window, which I washed with vinegar and polished to a glittering transparency. The shop shelves, floors, and walls were sanded smooth and finally given a fresh coat of paint in three different shades of green. The travertine marble counter, scrubbed with borax, showed itself to be the gleaming white glory of the apothecary. Then Benito built me rodent-proof containers for my storeroom.

  I worried that my shelves would look bare with too few jars and bottles of remedies, but I cleverly conceived of displaying myriad bunches of herbs in the empty spaces rather than, like my father had done, hanging them in the storeroom. In this way I managed, by bringing the outdoors inside, to cheer up the look of the shop as well as improve its smell.

  During those weeks, neighbors and passersby stuck their heads into the shop and I happily made their acquaintance. They were, I later learned, typical Florentines—friendly but wary, loathing stupidity and loving to gossip. Where in Vinci I had eschewed the practice of gossiping, now I embraced it. It was the best way to stay informed, and the people with whom I enjoyed this friendly chatter were likely, when I opened for business, to become my customers. And the more of them that came to believe my disguise now, the better.

  All the talk in those weeks was of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s marriage, how his mother, Lucrezia, had made a special trip to Rome to spy on the sixteen-year-old prospective wife as she was coming and going to church, in order to decide on her appropriateness. The Medici matron had found Clarice Orsini’s face too round and her neck too thin. The education she’d received had been ordinary, not nearly as fine as her three daughters’. Perhaps it was Clarice’s shyness and modesty that caused the Orsini girl to “poke her head forward like a chicken” when she walked, my neighbor surmised. Lucrezia de’ Medici had conceded that Lorenzo’s prospective wife had pretty reddish hair, long graceful white hands, and a nicely shaped bosom. But in the end, my neighbor concluded, the size of her dowry was the deciding factor.

  Despite a promise of many customers, I was not yet ready to open my apothecary. I had need of an outdoor sign, and I knew exactly where I would procure one. The thought made my heart race.

  I would be going to the famous bottega of Andrea Verrocchio.

  The confidence I had acquired in the past month from successfully passing as a man began to evaporate as I took to the streets on foot to visit my son. I had deemed it wise to keep both the move to Florence and my male disguise a secret from him, for no other reason than worry that the letters might fall into the wrong hands. I had no fear of Leonardo’s response at seeing me in a tunic and cap. In the years since his birth in Vinci, the adversity and ostracism we had endured on one hand, and the joyful education we had shared on the other, had forged the deepest understanding between us. It was one that allowed for games and practical jokes—a bond that few mothers shared with their children.

  He would recognize me in an instant and join the ruse with relish. For he missed me in his life as sorely as I missed him. I was sure of this.

  What I did fear was my ability to fool Maestro Verrocchio, with his discerning artist’s eye. Surely he could tell a man from a woman. But I had no choice. Today would set my course in stone. If I was found out, the humiliation and scandal would not simply be mine, but my son’s as well.

  I had to be strong, fearless. And I had to succeed.

  As I made my way through the streets I was but mildly distracted by the beauty of the frescoes painted on the façades of the churches, at every corner shrine, their candles illuminating a Madonna and child painted by one of the great masters. I was coming to see that such displays were less a sacred art than Florence bragging about its world-famous artisans. Old Roman columns graced a minor piazza, or an ancient stone sarcophagus, now a water trough where horses stood and drank.

  I arrived at the artisans district and was directed to Via Agnolo, a narrow but carefully paved street lined not with houses or palazzos but with one workshop after another.

  For all his disreputable behavior toward his son, I thought, Piero has done well by Leonardo in arranging this apprenticeship with Verrocchio.

  Looking down Via Agnolo I could see at a glance that one bottega above all was a hive of activity. I approached slowly, watching several young men loading an ornately carved and painted headboard on a horse cart, trying, with some difficulty, to avoid a clutch of boys playing with a ball, and chickens pecking at scratch on the pavement. Finally they lashed the bed head securely to the cart’s rails and sent it on its way.

  Standing before Verrocchio’s bottega I saw its grand arched entry-way, which, except for a heavy awning, left open the whole expanse of whitewashed studio. Its vaulted ceiling stretched out in a long, broad rectangle, with a smaller opening to a work yard. Some of the studio’s wares were on display in front—a gilded basket and a fantastically painted wedding chest, the scarf that Lorenzo de’ Medici had worn on the day of his betrothal festival, and next to it his brother Giuliano’s suit of armor.

  Verrocchio was very much a favorite of the city’s leading family. Indeed, from all the artisans in Florence, he had been chosen to create the tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici.

  The young men who had loaded the cart had gone bac
k inside and I could see now they were, each one of them, an apprentice in the shop. Straightening my back and rising to my full height—now two full inches above that with which nature had endowed me by use of a lift in my slippers—I entered the bottega.

  I could see a stairway at the back leading to what I presumed were the living quarters above. On both sides of me rose the most astonishing array of industry. My nose was assailed by dust and sweat and pungent varnishes and solvents. The place echoed with hammering, clanging, the hiss of white-hot steel meeting water, a metal point chipping marble. Strangely there were no human sounds. All the boys and young men were working in concentration, or at least obedient silence.

  One apprentice swept the floor with a wide broom. Another stood at a workbench cleaning a vast array of paintbrushes, and next to him an older boy ground colors at a large grindstone. The walls were variously hung with tools or sketches or carnival masks and death masks. A wooden model of a small church stood on a turntable.

  I watched as a boy plucked an egg from a chicken’s nest box next to a worktable, delivering it to another apprentice mixing bright blue tempera. The egg was cracked into a bowl and added to the color. Near him on a bench was another boy gathering onto a stick a bunch of boar’s bristles, fashioning a paintbrush. Near him was a youngster covering a large wooden panel with white paint.

  I studied every face, looking for my son, but he was so far nowhere among these boys. They were—here in the front of the shop—younger than Leonardo, no more than thirteen, the age at which he had arrived in Florence.

  At an imperceptible demarcation in the studio, the age of the apprentices rose a year or two and the jobs at which they worked became more skilled. One was decorating a chest with a fire-breathing dragon, another applying gold leaf to the halo of a sweet-faced Madonna. A boy polished the round cheeks of a small bronze cherub. Another stood at a large panel laying the first colors onto a cartoon outline of what I could see would be a major painting of saints and angels.