“It’s not me I worry about,” I said. “Silvano will kill one of the other children if I leave.”
“With the condottieri gone, Silvano is left defenseless, and he’s not young and vigorous like you. You could make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else.” The Jew’s voice rumbled with a heavy undertone. The import of his words struck through my core like a lightning bolt. I literally stumbled, then steadied myself with a hand on the rough stone wall. It wasn’t just the Jew’s hand that had healing power, his words did, too. My trembling stilled and a terrible calm took over.
“I have been afraid for so many years that I didn’t notice I didn’t have to be afraid anymore,” I whispered. “But where will I go? I came from the streets, but there’s no one to give alms to the poor with the plague about.”
“To my home. You will live with me and my family.”
It was almost too cruel an offer because of its impossibility. I was torn between knowing that the stains at my core made me worthless and feeling as Adam might have felt if God had laughed with compassion instead of retribution, and invited him to kill the serpent to reenter Eden. I shook my head. “I wouldn’t dishonor—”
“The greater dishonor would be mine, if I didn’t reciprocate after you risked your life to save mine and my daughter’s,” he said, in the calm resonant voice that I would come to cherish. “You wouldn’t have me dishonor myself, would you? What’s your name?”
“I am Luca Bastardo.”
“Good, Luca.” He gripped my shoulder, his serious eyes peering deeply into mine. “This is Rebecca, and I am Moshe Sforno. I live in the Oltrarno, in the Jewish section. Everyone knows my home. You free yourself, do whatever you need to do, and then come find me. You have a home with me.” He scooped up his daughter. “I don’t care about the past. Today you saved my daughter and me from a terrible death. That’s all I need to know.” He stepped out into the street with little Rebecca in his arms. I watched them from the alleys. Even back then I knew what I have experienced so tragically since then, that mobs of people turn mindless and act quickly to effect murder. When Sforno and his daughter reached the Oltrarno, I turned. It was time for me to return to Silvano.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I arrived back at the dark palazzo. I looked with fresh eyes at my surroundings. As Sforno had guessed, there were no condottieri in evidence. I tried to recall when last I’d seen them; it had been months. And there had been fewer in the last years than the previous ones. Why had I never noticed? What was it about the dead time in this shuttered place that had cozened me into complacence? I had let fear freeze me like a figure in a painting into the moment when Silvano was beating me, or the worse one where he was cutting Marco. I banged on the door and the skinny foreign girl opened it.
“Out of my way, woman,” I commanded. She shrank back. “Leave the door open!” I said. I marched to the window by the door and yanked at the thick velvet drapes. Clouds of pale gray dust swirled out. With a creak, the drapes came down in my hand. The honeyed light of afternoon poured into the foyer, illuminating the spiral dance of dust motes, and the girl gasped. I dragged the drapes down the hall so they made a sibilant sound.
Silvano was alone in the dining room. His abbaco ledger lay on the table in front of him. His graying head snapped up at my approach. I threw the drapes onto the floor. Blood dripped from my arm, pooling on the floor, but I paid no attention to it.
“I won’t be staying,” I said. Silvano rose from the table, but stiffly, I noted with satisfaction. His knees had grown sore with age. How had I failed to observe that?
“I wondered when the cub would grow some teeth,” he said coolly. His nostrils flared. A knife flashed in his hand, but I wasn’t afraid. I was going to defend myself. I was going to end my long indenture. I felt a solid column of light snap into a straight line in the center of my body, from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head: a pure expression of this moment now.
He stepped out from the table. “You’ll be sorry, Bastardo. You can’t imagine the pain you’ll suffer. Your fancy parents would be ashamed. Your people have pure blood, but you’ve corrupted it and shamed them!”
“Don’t talk about my parents,” I warned.
“They knew from your birth that you were an unholy abomination who would never age as he was supposed to, and that’s why they lost you. They wanted to! Think how they would feel if they knew what you did to Marco!” He sneered. I stumbled backward, shocked. “You think I didn’t know about that, Bastardo? I have many spies. I know what you are. A killer, like I am! You hate me, but you’re like me!” He was gloating and moving toward me.
“I’m nothing like you!”
“You’re just like me, but worse, because you’re a whore, and damned by black magic, which keeps you young. Your parents saw their blood was spoiled in you and that only evil could come from you.” As he approached me, he tossed his knife back and forth from hand to hand.
“My parents loved me! They were good people, real people, who searched for me!”
“I should have sold you to the Church long ago, with the document and the story about the heretics. I never forgot your mother’s hair and eyes, they were exactly like yours, and even if you hadn’t matured to bear the mark of heresy on your chest, I could have convinced the Church that you were the boy in that letter! The Church would have rewarded me well, it gets so worked up about the good God and evil God nonsense. As if God could be anything other than everywhere. The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
“Because there’s evil on the earth, evil men like you!” I cried. “There’s no God in you!”
“I’m not a freak whore bastard who won’t grow up, like you,” he crowed. “Who’s really the godless one? I thought I’d get more money for delivering you as a grown man with the mark the letter describes, but you wouldn’t mature! All my plans for Nicolo and me had to wait for you, and you’ve always been trouble! You’d live forever with your dark sorcery until you’re burnt at the stake for being a witch, but I’m going to kill you now!”
“No, I am going to kill you!” I shouted. All of my senses tingled and intensified. Suddenly I could hear, see, smell, taste, and feel as never before: the sibilant squawk of the exotic bird Silvano had bought, the tiny skitterings of a mouse running under the floorboards, the harsh scent of the lye used to clean the floor, the sobs of a child upstairs, Silvano’s clove perfume, the increasing tempo of his heart, and the frantic flow of blood through his veins: they were louder, stronger, more vivid to me than anything ever before had been in my life. It was like another world, another cosmos, was present within this one.
Shapes and forms dissolved. The outlines of objects smeared out, and what was left was glazed with light and separated into dancing motes and juicy scrims of color. Even the walls fell away, and I could see outdoors: flowers and trees and other piazze, all of them flying apart like a handful of sand thrown into the wind. I could have seen anything, anywhere, but I focused on Silvano. He was surrounded by a haze and he seemed not to move. After what felt like an hour, he was still advancing toward me. It took an eternity for him to reach me. His hand was so slow that it was easy for me to grab his wrist and shake the blade from it. The blade clattered onto the floor, and a disjointed cry went up—Silvano’s? A strength I had never known before possessed me. I felt a lush crunch as the small bones of his wrist gave inward. I shivered with delight. His other hand swept toward my face, fingers outstretched as if to jab my eyes, but it was slow. I knocked it back. The wrist I was holding went floppy. Silvano dropped to his knees. He pawed vainly at my hand with his free one. I kept squeezing. There was a sound in the background and I realized it was Silvano screaming.
“Stop, I beg you!” he was pleading, his pale face turned up to me. “I’ll pay you anything, anything! More gold florins than you can carry!”
“A bag of gold florins? Like the silk bag you beat us children with?” I asked, fury building again within me. I released his w
rist abruptly and wrapped my hands around his neck. It was intoxicating to have his life in my fingers, to feel the blue veins throbbing against my hungry palms, to know that his pulse would soon dwindle into emptiness, into my freedom. He would stop breathing and all the horrors of the last eighteen years would die with him.
Satisfaction thrummed inside me like the glorious song of a lyre in a pageant. I had killed before, knowing only the sickening burden and shame of it. For this one time, for this one evil man who had hurt so many children, I knew the intoxicating pleasure. Since that day, I have killed many men, but none with the same gusto. Just as I was going to wring Silvano’s neck like a chicken’s, something hit me. It was Nicolo.
“You leave my father alone!” he screamed. I punched him, hard, sent him flying across the room. All those years ago when I lived on the streets, Paolo with the dark gypsy looks had taught me how to punch, and I never forgot anything I learned. Nicolo grabbed his father’s knife from the floor and leapt at me. He appeared, like his father before him, slowed down to my preternaturally heightened senses. I slammed my fist into his jutting chin before he could reach me. He crumpled into a heap on the drapes. I turned back to Silvano, who was gasping and writhing on the ground. His pupils were huge with my reflection.
“Don’t kill my son,” he whispered, clutching his bruised throat. “He’s just a boy!”
“Bella was just a little girl when you cut her throat,” I said. I wrapped my hands around Silvano’s head and twisted, hard. There was a crack and his body went limp.
“Papa!” Nicolo cried. Weeping, he fell upon Silvano’s body.
“I’m going to free the other children,” I said. Nicolo attacked me again, throwing himself hard against my back. I whirled around, flung him off. He landed with a crunch against the gilded cage, and the red and green bird inside it screamed to complain. It beat its wings against its bars. “No one will be left imprisoned!” I vowed. I ran over and freed the bird. It flew around the room, shrilling and flapping its wings. I took up Silvano’s knife. “I’ll release it outside!”
“No! You won’t get my papa’s bird!” Nicolo shrieked. He jumped up and grabbed at the bird, caught it with a quick swipe and then wrung its neck, just as I had wrung Silvano’s. He swung the limp bird by its feet, laughing maniacally. “Ha, ha, Luca Bastardo, you freak whore!”
I went a little mad. Not as mad as I have been since the great tragedy that has come to define my life, but with something of the same blind hallucinatory rage. “You can’t take away its freedom!” I screamed. I danced around the room, waving the knife. “You can’t do that!” I stopped in front of Nicolo. “Since you’ve killed it, you’re going to eat it! Now!” I held Silvano’s knife to Nicolo’s throat. He picked up the bird, trembling. “Eat it! Eat it!” I screamed, over and over again, pressing the knife until a drop of blood appeared on his scrawny throat.
Nicolo jerked the bird to his mouth and bit into its neck. He chewed, swallowed, feathers and all. He lifted his pimply, tear-smeared face to me. Bubbles of snot and blood coagulated on his wisp of a mustache. His sharp nose and thrusting chin made him the image of his father, and I was tempted to kill Nicolo, to see them both closed away in small boxes, unshriven, unmourned. What stayed my hand was the thought that Nicolo was still a child, and I would prove myself unlike Bernardo Silvano, who had killed so many children.
The bird’s blood dripped down Nicolo’s chin. He vomited violently onto the carpet, forcefully ejecting sodden red feathers. I laughed, and picked up one of the red feathers. I thrust it against his forehead, and because it was wet, it stuck to his skin. I laughed and laughed.
“I will never forget this! I will never forget you, and what you have done, Luca Bastardo! Someday I will avenge my father’s death. I swear it on my own blood, on my father’s body! I will make you suffer, you will die a horrible death!” Nicolo rose up on his knees and shook his fist at me, the red feather still clinging to him. “I curse you and curse you!”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe in curses said by little girls wearing red feathers.” I stepped over his father’s body and went to confront the patrons and to open doors for the children. If I had known then how potent cruel intention is when joined to blood fury, I would not have discounted his words. Curses have power, and Nicolo’s curses ripened, marking my life forever.
Chapter 7
SHAKING, I STOOD AT THE LARGE DOOR, the carved portone, to Moses Sforno’s house. It was a typical Florentine home of the time, three stories high and constructed of stone, with evenly spaced windows under arched lintels, so ordinary that it awed me, unnatural creature of the streets and the brothel that I was. The pale gold light of a candle streamed out from a window with an open shutter and made a monstrous shadow of me on the street. I reached up to grasp the doorknocker, a brass plate shaped like a six-pointed star with a ring through the center for banging. The full moon gleamed on the blood slicked all over my arms. A succulent, oniony smell wafted from the house like a deep breath blown out; it was dinnertime. How could I, a stranger covered with gore, intrude on this intimate family time?
I was stepping away without knocking when the door opened. Sforno stood there, outlined in the yellow candlelight. “I heard something, or maybe I felt it,” he said, stroking his beard. “I thought it might be you.”
“I’m free of Silvano,” I said quietly. My chest felt hollow, which surprised me. I had no idea freedom would feel so empty, after all the years that I had longed for it. What was left, if the prison was gone? How would I now fill my days? Was living with strangers really the answer?
“Come in.”
“I’m not clean,” I demurred, with a sharp spurt of the familiar fear that had dogged me at Silvano’s: the fear of breaking the rules and being harshly punished. Sforno pulled me gently into the house. I stood in a foyer on a threadbare blue and gold carpet of Saracen design. The walls and ceiling were bathed in a warm lucency by lamps set on old carved wooden chests called cassones. A dark-haired woman wearing a patterned blue dress and a yellow cappucci, a cowl, swept into the foyer.
“Moshe, who is it?” she asked sharply. She stood beside Sforno, staring. She had high cheekbones, a cleft chin, and a strong nose, was full-bodied and womanly, handsome in the way in which little Rebecca’s prettiness would mature. Small crow’s-feet radiated out from wary dark eyes that scanned me intently, taking in my bloody arms and clothes.
“My friend Luca, who saved Rebecca and me today,” Sforno said.
She smiled. “You have my gratitude. Few Gentiles would do as you did today!”
Moshe nodded. “He’s staying with us.”
“For dinner?” the woman asked.
“He’s going to live with us, Leah,” Moshe said, in a quiet, firm voice.
“What? Moshe, he’s—”
“Wife, set a place at the table for him while I take him to clean up,” Sforno said. There was a warning note in his voice and my heart plummeted.
“I don’t want to cause trouble,” I said.
“Looks like you’ve already done that,” a merry bass voice rumbled. A thick-bodied older man came up by Mrs. Sforno. He had a full gray beard that reached to his belt, and a wild mane of gray-and-black hair. His face was broad and lined and graced with the largest nose and most cunning eyes I’d ever seen. He crossed his arms over his sturdy chest and laughed.
“You look like a wolf cub who had his way among the lambs.”
“I killed no lambs today,” I growled, nettled by his implication.
“Would it be so bad if you had?” He raised a grizzled eyebrow, challenging me. “Isn’t it necessary sometimes, for the lamb’s sake?”
“You killed someone?” asked Mrs. Sforno. She turned her face away, distressed. “There will be ufficiali after him!”
“Luca saved my life. And Rebecca’s. We owe him more than we can ever repay.” Sforno laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Her full mouth compressed into a thin line, but she tilted her head to lay her cheek on h
is hand and her face softened. Then her frown reappeared. “We’ll send the ufficiali away,” Sforno said. “We don’t need to know what Luca has done.”
But if I was going to live here, Sforno’s wife should know the truth. I didn’t want to conceal any acts that could ripen into danger for these good people. “I killed the proprietor of a brothel where children were kept as prostitutes,” I said directly to the woman. If she had raised her eyes, I would have met them squarely. She didn’t. In fact, she kept her gaze from mine for the many years I lived with her family.
“Is that all?” she snapped.
“I also killed seven patrons who were using the children. I stabbed two in the back, as they lay on the children. I cut the throats of three, and two I slit in the stomach,” I admitted. I was secretly pleased to have discovered such peculiar strength in myself; at the time, it seemed far more useful than unending youthfulness. I knew my actions made me appear unnatural, but I wasn’t silenced. For years Silvano had preyed upon my abnormalities to keep alive my fear of persecution by the outside world. I realized with a shock that that old fear was gone, washed away in the blood of my oppressors. But in the absence of fear and in the presence of these good people, I felt not peace, but the weight of humiliation and guilt over what I’d done during my long indenture. That would take far longer to overcome than the fear.
“I would want you at my back in a fight.” The older man laughed. “Wolf cub indeed!”
“He’s not some stray dog we can take in!” the woman objected. “He’s a Gentile who has killed Florentines. There will be people looking for him! I will spend my life being grateful to him for saving your life and Rebecca’s, but we have to be practical. No good can come of us harboring him. We could be forced to leave the city, or worse! They could harm our children! As Jews, we are already too vulnerable to take in a murderer!”
“Leah, without him, I would not be here. Nor would your baby,” Sforno said soothingly.
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