Signora Da Vinci

by Maxwell, Robin

  Sandro Botticelli scooted between Lorenzo and me, locking arms with us on either side. “Have you any new verse for tonight?” he asked his adopted brother.

  “A line or two,” Lorenzo answered modestly.

  “That’ll mean an epic poem,” Sandro ribbed. He turned to me. “He’s already famous for his sonnets, you know.”

  “Is that so?” I said, smiling.

  “He wrote a slew of them as a precocious youth,” Botticelli continued. “Love poems to the most beautiful woman in Florence. They were disgustingly sentimental.”

  “Fie on you!” Lorenzo laughed, jabbing Sandro in the side. “Stop here,” he ordered very suddenly, and at once the group obeyed him, as a military patrol would attend its captain. Then, in a quavering voice more filled with passion than tune, he began to sing to a closed second-story window:

  How beautiful is youth

  So soon it is over and gone . . .

  The others took up the song as a chorus, parroting the lines. By the time they were through, the window had opened and a very pretty young woman stepped out onto the loggia. Despite the frigid air, she wore just her tight-waisted gown, the top of her creamy breasts pale and exposed in the moonlight.

  “Who is that serenading me?” she called down to the raucous group that had suddenly gone very still. “Come, tell me who you are! I cannot see your faces, but I think I hear the scratchy croak of a Medici.”

  Suddenly a snowball was arching through the air, and with a soft splat it landed squarely in the girl’s cleavage. She let out a yelp, sending the young noblemen into convulsive laughter.

  I heard Giuliano’s surprised exclamation. “Lorenzo, you’re mad!”

  I was shocked to realize that so refined a gentleman as I thought Lorenzo to be would have done such a thing. I held my breath, wondering what might come next. A scolding. The lady’s quick disappearance from the loggia. An angry parent at the door. I was afraid to look up.

  The next thing I knew a snowball had landed on the head of Sandro Botticelli. Now there were mock cries of outrage from the men. There was scrambling to find piles of snow to throw up at the girl, and she was now simply pushing the white stuff from the loggia rail down onto our heads.

  She was laughing gaily till we heard a gasp. She peered down, her face and bosom dripping, and called, “You’re all terrible!” Then she darted back inside.

  “‘Oh nothing, Mama,’” Giuliano mimicked in the voice of the young woman, “‘I’m just taking the night air!’”

  Everyone roared as we all hurried away round the corner. Giuliano and Sandro paired up ahead. Lorenzo and I walked together.

  “Weren’t you just married?” I said to him, genuinely interested, yet aware I might be treading on dangerous ground. “Is this how a newlywed is meant to behave?”

  “It’s permissible,” he answered, caught off guard. “More than permissible. Expected. Surely you’re no stranger to courtly love. And then there is Platonic love.” Once these last words were out of his mouth Lorenzo grew distinctly uncomfortable as he tried to clarify. “I love my brother more than I ever will my wife. I love Angelo Poliziano and Sandro Botticelli more than I ever will my wife.”

  He seemed to collect himself. “Clarice was ‘given to me’ for reasons that are political and military. She’ll be the mother of my children, and I will bear her great affection for that, and of course I will love my sons and daughters. But my wife shares none of my intellectual”—he hesitated—“or my spiritual passion. I had hoped for more in that regard.” Then Lorenzo smiled broadly. “But no matter. I am the luckiest man in the wide world. You will never hear me complain about my marriage again.”

  We had, in our pairs, arrived at the Mercato Vecchio. A great crowd of men, women, and children had already gathered in the market square and were chattering expectantly, slapping their arms against the cold. In the center, beyond the masses, I could hear a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones. A temporary pen had been erected there, and from the sound of it, it held a half dozen horses.

  As Lorenzo and I made our way forward through the crush, a loud explosion concussed my ears and all at once the sky was illuminated, as though a thousand stars had exploded overhead—fireworks.

  The oohs and aahs of the people with every gaudy display were coming fast and furious, and now Lorenzo and I stood at the central pen. The beasts were wild-eyed at the commotion around them and the exploding lights above.

  Then someone opened a gate in the pen and steered into it a single horse. I could see it was a mare and realized instantly that the ones waiting for her were all stallions. The crowd stirred, its attention drawn away from the fireworks to the show about to begin on the ground.

  The mare’s scent instantly inflamed the male horses, who began, with a chorus of whinnies and snorts, to bump against one another and vie for nearness to the female. When light again blazed overhead I saw the fire reflected in the mare’s terrified eyes. The strongest of the stallions mounted her then, and the Florentines erupted into cheers. He thrust again and I found myself unable to tear my own eyes away from the lathery chaos of horseflesh before me, the mixture of raw animal pleasure and pain.

  Then I caught sight of Lorenzo at the edge of the crowd. He was standing with a servant I recognized from the family palazzo. I could not hear the man’s voice, but from Lorenzo’s slack jaw and the dull pain in his eyes I knew a tragedy had befallen the Medici.

  I pushed through the onlookers to my friend’s side. He turned to me. “Will you find Giuliano and Sandro?” he pleaded. “It’s our father.” Distracted, he looked away. “I have to go. Now.”

  “I’ll find them,” I said. “Lorenzo . . .” He turned, looking back to me, stunned, like a bludgeoned fish. I put my arms around him and pulled him to me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Papa . . . ,” he whispered, then disappeared into the crowd.

  I went to find his brothers.

  CHAPTER 13

  The cavernous Chapel of San Lorenzo, like all churches, echoed and amplified every sound made within its soaring walls. But this day, utter cacophony reigned. The place was devoid of its Dominican monks and friars in their daily plain-song and prayer, but was instead frenetic with stonemasons, wood- and metalworkers pounding, chiseling, and sawing with great abandon.

  It pleased me that I recognized so many of the faces, for they were all master craftsmen and apprentices from Verrocchio’s bottega. Conferring with the maestro himself was Lorenzo, and now, to my joy, I saw Leonardo enter from a back door carrying over his shoulder lengths of thin, braided metal wire.

  I sat well back in a pew, aware of the strangeness of my surroundings. I had not stepped foot in any religious establishment, save the small chapel at the Palazzo Medici, for many years. The beauty of San Lorenzo’s architecture and the fabulousness of its decoration could not ameliorate for me the hypocritical sanctity of the place. I had no patience for the Church of Rome or anything it stood for. I wondered how Leonardo, himself staunchly pagan, was faring in these surroundings.

  I watched as Lorenzo clapped Verrocchio on the shoulder and escaped from the din out the back door. Following him, I made my way up the side aisle so quietly that the busy artisans, including Leonardo, took no notice of me. There would be time to see him later.

  Outside I found myself in the quiet of the monastery’s courtyard and saw that Lorenzo had taken a seat on a stone bench near the central fountain. I sat down next to him.

  He turned and gave me a smile, warm but lacking the sparkle I’d become accustomed to. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “Mama tells me you’re well. The shop is thriving.”

  “No little thanks to her.”

  There was such gravity about him now, I thought, and it seemed that in the ten months since I had last seen him, he had aged ten years. But would not I, too, be grave if my father had died after a long and painful illness? If I had become the most powerful nobleman in Florence? And here, today, Lorenzo de’ Medici was attending to the business of Piero
’s tomb—the commission he had given to Verrocchio’s workshop—one that he, as the eldest son, must insure would properly honor the man who had served the city well, if not long.

  But there was more to Lorenzo’s distracted sadness than that. I was sure of it. He had written, asking me to meet him at the church, reminding me that if I came I would see my dear nephew as well.

  As if I needed luring, I thought.

  Lorenzo sighed.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked him gently.

  He laughed, but the sound was anything but cheerful.

  “I’m thinking about the people who died in Volterra. The women raped. The orphans made. I’m thinking how their deaths and misery came at my hands, and now lie hard on my conscience.”

  I was groping for words. All of Florence had heard of the sack of its neighboring village of Volterra by a mercenary army.

  “Why is it on your head?” I asked him, afraid of sounding ignorant or ill-informed. But I had truly heard nothing in the local gossip that implicated Lorenzo de’ Medici in the massacre there.

  He grew silent again, thinking hard. I did not press him and finally he began to speak. He had the sound of a man in a confessional admitting his sins to the priest.

  “When that delegation from the Signoria came to me after my father died, they told me they were commissioned by six hundred Florentine men, all of whom wished me . . . begged me . . . to take on Piero’s mantle and rule Florence.”

  I knew this story. It had become the most popular piece of gossip, near legend, when it had happened.

  “I told them I was unfit. Too young—only twenty-one. Told them I lacked vital experience.” He paused before he continued. “They refused to take no for an answer. I thought first of Giuliano. That of course he would rule with me. He is only seventeen, yet . . .” He pressed his lips together and stared straight ahead. “Pairs of brothers ruling together is the way it has always been done in my family. In Florence. My great-grandfather Cosimo with his brother Lorenzo. My father with Giovanni. Who was I to turn my back on so beloved, so expected, a custom? But how could I, with my anger, my intolerance, my vindictiveness, my extravagance—and my brother still a green lad—hope to keep peace in Italy?” He squeezed his forehead between his fingers. “I looked at the men of the delegation and I saw they were asking that I take on an impossible task.”

  “Why impossible?”

  “Because Florence is a republic, not a kingdom, Cato. And they were asking me to become a king. But a king without a crown. Without a treasury. Without an army. Somehow I, at twenty-one years of age, should understand how to lead not just Florence but reign with the dukes of Italy and the pope in Rome. To treat with the highest rulers in Europe. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire . . . and do so as a private citizen!”

  I sat still, considering Lorenzo’s words. I had, of course, never thought of his rule in this way.

  “And then, but a few months after, came Volterra.” His olive features suddenly looked ashen. “I made a grave mistake, siding with the owners of the alum mine . . . and not with the villagers. When they defied my ruling I allowed a violent conditori to station an army of mercenaries outside the village.”

  “You did not give him the order to attack, Lorenzo. Everyone knows that.”

  “The army should not have been stationed there in the first place! That was my error. My youth. My inexperience.” He shook his head. “My pride.”

  “Relinquish your post, then,” I said.

  “No!” he quickly cried. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Of course I don’t. You were born to lead, Lorenzo.”

  He sat, his elbows pressed into his knees, his chin resting between the palms of his hands. The posture was so human, so lacking pretension, that it endeared him to me even further.

  “I am the cappa della bottega of Florence,” he said. “The foreman of the shop. I must be good at what I do, and prevail in this role for which Providence has selected me. The Florentine military is weak, so we must survive other ways—by our financial dominance. Our mercantile strength.”

  “This is not beyond your capabilities,” I told him. “You have a genius for diplomacy.”

  He considered this. “Even if I do, I must make amends for Volterra. Somehow.”

  “Build an orphanage there,” I said. “Send the widows a pension.”

  “And what do I do for the ruined girls?”

  Ruined, I thought. I had been “ruined” in a small town.

  “Send them tutors,” I said.

  “Tutors?” This took him by surprise.

  “If they’ve lost their reputation, let them have an education.”

  He smiled. “Spoken like a true scholar.” It was the first time that day I had seen a spark of joy in him. He thought about my idea. “Plato would have approved. He believed that Athens wasted the talents of half the population by not using women in government and military work.” He thought for a moment more. “I’ve already begun reviving and endowing the university of Pisa. It’s fallen on hard times. I could hire tutors from there, and from the university here in Florence. Send them to Volterra.” He eyed me appreciatively. “I like the way you think, Cato.”

  “There’s no greater compliment than that,” I said. “To me. To my father.” I felt myself reddening. Though Lorenzo spoke of the mind, and had surely sought my counsel today, that strange spark between us had, in the space of a single conversation, reignited.

  A commotion of voices at the church’s back door was a welcome diversion from our heavy and uncomfortable conversation. It was the gang of Verrocchio’s workmen, each carrying a small sack with his midday meal.

  Leonardo must indeed have noticed me inside, as he made directly for the bench where I sat. He muttered “my lord” and bowed with the grace of a fine gentleman to Lorenzo, who returned the greeting with a respectful tilt of his head.

  But when I stood to embrace my son I felt an odd tension in his muscles and realized in his tongue-tied silence that followed that Leonardo was starstruck in the presence of Lorenzo de’ Medici. He could hardly believe that his once-disgraced mother—albeit in the guise of a man—could claim friendship with such a high personage. The very ruler of Florence. I so wished Leonardo to be at ease with Lorenzo.

  “What have you got in the sack?” I asked him.

  “The maestro’s cook sends us bread and cheese and wine, and if we’re lucky, a portion of stew.” He opened his bag and brought out the brown half loaf and a large square of pale yellow cheese. Without hesitation he broke these up into three parts and handed them all around. Then he peered into the sack again and removed a stoneware crock and a spoon. “It took some doing to convince her to leave the meat out of mine,” Leonardo continued, offering the crock and the spoon to Lorenzo, who accepted it, dipping his bread in the stew.

  “No meat?” Lorenzo inquired.

  “I don’t eat the stuff, nor do I eat fish or fowl. Anything with a face on it.”

  “That’s extraordinary,” Lorenzo said, then handed me the crock.

  I ate a spoonful, then said, “It’s also heretical according to the church fathers.”

  Lorenzo sighed. “The church fathers . . .” He murmured the words, then said no more. I thought it best to change the subject.

  “Lorenzo has a horse called Morello, who is as devoted to his master as his master is to him,” I told my son.

  Leonardo’s face lit up instantly. “Tell me about him,” he demanded of Lorenzo, then gave his full attention to the answer.

  “He’s a beautiful beast, chestnut with four white feet and a star of white on his forehead. He holds his tail in a proud arch, and his legs are like steel. Most of all I love Morello’s head—just magnificent—long and handsome with black liquid eyes . . .”

  Utterly rapt, his eyes closed imagining the horse as it was described, Leonardo smiled. “I have a passion for all living creatures, but none do I love more than horses. There is such a dignity about them. So much strength and s
o much sweetness in a single package. One can commune very deeply with a horse.”

  Lorenzo nodded, feeling the truth in Leonardo’s sentiments and, I thought, suddenly understanding his heart. “Have you a horse of your own?” Lorenzo asked.

  “No, I’ve no time to give to a horse. And no money to keep one. I ride whenever someone will loan me a mount.” He smiled in my direction. “And I commune with my uncle’s mule. We’re old friends.”

  “I have a stable full of beautiful animals, Leonardo,” Lorenzo said. There was such matter-of-factness in the statement, I thought, with not a trace of gloating or ostentation. “Please feel free to ride any of them.”

  “Except Morello,” Leonardo said with a teasing grin.

  “Except Morello,” Lorenzo agreed. He laughed, and I with him.

  I could not have been more pleased with the outcome of this meeting if I had written the dialogue myself.

  “What’s all the commotion?”

  We looked up to see one of the other apprentices standing above us. He asked Leonardo, “You coming carousing with us tonight? Visit the prostitutes?” He grinned wickedly. “Girls or boys. Your choice.”

  My son flushed with embarrassment, and even I had a difficult time keeping a straight face. “Of course,” Leonardo answered. He seemed to have regained his composure. “But not too early. The maestro gets cross with us if we haven’t finished our work.”

  The boy moved on to invite other apprentices to the night’s adventure.

  “Well,” Lorenzo said to me as he stood. “Shall we go and see what progress has been made on the tomb without a crowd surrounding it?”

  I rose to his side. “Ciao, Leonardo.”

  “Uncle . . . ,” he said and nodded a good-bye.

  “Fare well tonight,” Lorenzo instructed him with a conspiratorial wink. But when my friend’s eyes met mine he looked quickly away.

  “I shall do my best,” Leonardo called after us as we moved toward the chapel door.