by Rice, Anne
The old man was winning the card game. “There, you see, I told you. Our luck!” he said. He gathered up his greasy loose cards to shuffle them and to play again.
The priest looked at him with glazed eyes, as though he could not gather his own wits even to fool or reassure his old father, and then he looked at me.
“I saw these angels in Florence,” I said, “and I disappointed them, broke my vow to them, lost my soul.”
He turned from his father to me sharply.
“Why do you prolong this?” he asked.
“I will not hurt you. Neither will my companion,” I said. I sighed. It would have been that moment in a conversation when I would have reached for the cup or the tankard and taken a drink. My hunger hurt me. I wondered if the thirst hurt Ursula. I stared at the priest’s wine, which was nothing to me now, nothing, and I looked at his face, sweating in the light of the candle, and I went on:
“I want you to know that I saw them, that I talked to them, these angels. They tried to help me to destroy those monsters who held sway over this town, and over the souls of those here. I want you to know, Father.”
“Why, son, why tell me?”
“Because they were beautiful, and they were as real as we are, and you have seen us. You have seen hellish things; you have seen sloth and treachery, cowardice and deceit. You see devils now, vampires. Well, I want you to know that with my own eyes I saw angels, true angels, magnificent angels, and that they were more glorious than I can ever tell you in words.”
He regarded me thoughtfully for a long time, and then he looked at Ursula, who sat troubled and looking up at me, rather afraid that I would unduly suffer, and then he said:
“Why did you fail them? Why did they come with you in the first place, and if you had the aid of angels, why did you fail?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I smiled. “For love.”
He didn’t answer.
Ursula leaned her head against my arm. I felt her free hair brushing my back as she let me feel her weight.
“For love!” the priest repeated.
“Yes, and for honor as well.”
“Honor.”
“No one will ever understand it. God will not accept it, but it’s true, and now, what is there, Father, that divides us, you and I, and the woman who sits with me? What is between us—the two parties—the honest priest and the two demons?”
The little man chuckled suddenly. He had slapped down a marvelous run of cards. “Look at that!” he said. He looked up at me with his clever little eyes. “Oh, your question, forgive me. I know the answer.”
“You do?” asked the priest, turning to the little old man. “You know the answer?”
“Of course, I do,” said his father. He dealt out another card. “What separates them now from a good Confession is weakness and the fear of Hell if they must give up their lives.”
The priest stared at his father in amazement.
So did I.
Ursula said nothing. Then she kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s leave them now,” she whispered. “There is no more Santa Maddalana. Let’s go.”
I looked up, around the darkened room of the Inn. I looked at the old barrels. I looked in haunted perplexity and appalling sorrow at all things that humans used and touched. I looked at the heavy hands of the priest, folded on the table before me. I looked at the hair on his hands, and then up at his thick lips and his large watering and sorrowful eyes.
“Will you accept this from me?” I whispered. “This secret, of angels? That I saw them! I! And you, you see what I am, and you know therefore that I know whereof I speak. I saw their wings, I saw their halos, I saw their white faces, and I saw the sword of Mastema the powerful, and it was they who helped me sack the castle and lay waste to all the demons save for this one, this child bride, who is mine.”
“Child bride,” she whispered. It filled her with delight. She looked at me, musingly, and hummed a soft, old-fashioned air, one of those threads of songs from her times.
She spoke to me in an urgent persuasive whisper, squeezing my arm as she did:
“Come, Vittorio, leave these men in peace, and come with me, and I’ll tell you how indeed I was a child bride.” She looked at the priest with renewed animation. “I was, you know. They came to my father’s castle and purchased me as such, they said that I must be a virgin, and the midwives came and brought their basin of warm water, and they examined me and they said I was a virgin, and only then did Florian take me. I was his bride.”
The priest stared fixedly at her, as if he could not move if he wanted to move, and the old man merely glanced up again and again, cheerfully, nodding as he listened to her, and went on playing with his cards.
“Can you imagine my horror?” she asked them. She looked at me, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. It was in its ripples again from the plaits in which she’d had it bound earlier. “Can you imagine when I climbed onto the couch and I saw who was my bridegroom, this white thing, this dead thing, such as we look to you?”
The priest made no answer. His eyes filled slowly with tears. Tears!
It seemed a lovely human spectacle, bloodless, crystalline, and such an adornment for his old soft face, with its jowls and fleshy mouth.
“And then to be taken to a ruined chapel,” she said, “a ruined place, full of spiders and vermin, and there before a desecrated altar, to be stripped and laid down and taken by him and made his bride.”
She let go of my arm, her arms forming a loose embracing gesture. “Oh, I had a veil, a great long beautiful veil, and a dress of such fine flowered silk, and all this he tore from me, and took me first with his lifeless, seedless stone-hard organ and then with his fang teeth, like these very teeth which I have now. Oh, such a wedding, and my father had given me over for this.”
The tears coursed down the priest’s cheeks.
I stared at her, transfixed with sorrow and rage, rage against a demon I had already slaughtered, a rage that I hoped could reach down through the smoldering coals of Hell and find him with fingers like hot tongs.
I said nothing.
She raised her eyebrow; she cocked her head.
“He tired of me,” she said. “But he never stopped loving me. He was new to the Court of the Ruby Grail, a young Lord and seeking at every turn to increase his might and his romance! And later, when I asked for Vittorio’s life, he couldn’t refuse me on account of our vows exchanged on that stone altar so long ago. After he let Vittorio leave us, after he had him cast down in Florence, certain of Vittorio’s madness and ruin, Florian sang songs to me, songs for a bride. He sang the old poems as though our love could be revived.”
I covered my brow with my right hand. I couldn’t bear to weep the blood tears that flow from us. I couldn’t bear to see before me, as if painted by Fra Filippo, the very romance she described.
It was the priest who spoke.
“You are children,” he said. His lip trembled. “Mere children.”
“Yes,” she said in her exquisite voice, with certainty and a small accepting smile. She clasped my left hand in hers and rubbed it hard and tenderly. “Children forever. But he was only a young man, Florian, just a young man himself.”
“I saw him once,” said the priest, his voice thick with his crying but soft. “Only once.”
“And you knew?” I asked.
“I knew I was powerless and my faith was desperate, and that around me were bonds that I could not loose or break.”
“Let’s go now, Vittorio, don’t make him cry anymore,” said Ursula. “Come on, Vittorio. Let’s leave here. We need no blood tonight and cannot think of harming them, cannot even …”
“No, beloved, never,” I said to her. “But take my gift, Father, please, the only clean thing which I can give, my testimony that I saw the angels, and that they upheld me when I was weak.”
“And won’t you take absolution from me, Vittorio!” he said. His voice rose, and his chest seemed to increase in size. “Vittorio and Ursul
a, take my absolution.”
“No, Father,” I said. “We cannot take it. We don’t want it.”
“But why?”
“Because, Father,” said Ursula kindly, “we plan to sin again as soon as we possibly can.”
14
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
She didn’t lie.
We journeyed that night to my father’s house. It was nothing for us to make that journey, but it was many miles for a mortal, and word had not reached that forlorn farmland that the threat of the night demons, the vampires of Florian, was gone. Indeed, it is most likely that my farms were still deserted because ghastly tales were given out by those who had fled Santa Maddalana, traveling over hill and valley, mouth to mouth.
It didn’t take me long to realize, however, that the great castle of my family was occupied. A horde of soldiers and clerks had been hard at work.
As we crept over the giant wall after midnight, we found that all the dead of my family had been properly buried, or placed in their proper stone coffins beneath the chapel, and that the goods of the household, all of its abundant wealth, had been taken away. Only a few wagons remained of those which must have already started their progress south.
The few who slept in the offices of my father’s steward were keepers of the accounts of the Medici bank, and on tiptoe, in the dim light of a star-studded sky, I inspected the few papers they had left out to dry.
All of the inheritance of Vittorio di Raniari had been collected and catalogued, and was being taken on to Florence for him, to be placed in safety with Cosimo until such time as Vittorio di Raniari was twenty-four years of age and could thereby assume responsibility for himself as a man.
Only a few soldiers slept in the barracks. Only a few horses were quartered in the stables. Only a few squires and attendants slept in proximity to their Lords.
Obviously the great castle, being of no strategic use to Milanese or German or French or Papal authority, or to Florence, was not being restored or repaired, merely shut down.
Well before dawn, we left my home, but before going, I took leave of my father’s grave.
I knew that I would come back. I knew that soon the trees would climb the mountain to the walls. I knew that the grass would grow high through the crevices and cracks of the cobblestones. I knew that things human would lose all love of this place, as they had lost their love of so many ruins in the country round.
I would return then. I would come back.
That night, Ursula and I hunted the vicinity for the few brigands we could find in the woods, laughing gaily when we caught them and dragged them from their horses. It was a riotous old feast.
“And where now, my Lord?” my bride asked me towards morning. We had again found a cave for shelter, a deep and hidden place, full of thorny vines that barely scratched our resilient skin, behind a veil of wild blueberries that would hide us from all eyes, including that of the great rising sun.
“To Florence, my love. I have to go there. And in its streets, we’ll never suffer hunger, or discovery, and there are things which I must see with my own eyes.”
“But what are those things, Vittorio?” she asked.
“Paintings, my love, paintings. I have to see the angels in the paintings. I have to … face them, as it were.”
She was content. She had never seen the great city of Florence. She had, all her wretched eternity of ritual and courtly discipline, been contained in the mountains, and she lay down beside me to dream of freedom, of brilliant colors of blue and green and gold, so contrary to the dark red that she still wore. She lay down beside me, trusting me, and, as for me, I trusted nothing.
I only licked the human blood on my lips and wondered how long I might have on this earth before someone struck off my head with a swift and certain sword.
15
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
The city of Florence was in an uproar.
“Why?” I asked.
It was well past curfew, to which no one was paying much attention, and there was a huge crowd of students congregated in Santa Maria Maggiori—the Duomo—listening to a lecture by a humanist who pleaded that Fra Filippo Lippi was not such a pig.
No one took much note of us. We had fed early, in the countryside, and wore heavy mantles, and what could they see of us but a little pale flesh?
I went into the church. The crowd came out almost to the doors.
“What’s the matter? What’s happened to the great painter?”
“Oh, he’s done it now,” said the man who answered me, not even bothering to look at me or at the slender figure of Ursula clinging to me.
The man was too intent on looking at the lecturer, who stood up ahead, his voice echoing sharply in the overwhelming large nave.
“Done what?”
Getting no answer, I pushed my way a little deeper into the thick, odiferous human crowd, pulling Ursula with me. She was still shy of such an immense city, and she had not seen a Cathedral on this scale in the more than two hundred years of her life.
Once again I put my question to two young students, who turned at once to answer me, fashionable boys both, about eighteen, or what they called then in Florence giovani, being the most difficult of youths, too old to be a child, such as I was, and too young to be a man.
“Well, he asked for the fairest of the nuns to pose for the altarpiece that he was painting of the blessed Virgin, that’s what he did,” said the first student, black-haired and deep-eyed, staring at me with a cunning smile. “He asked for her as a model, asked that the convent choose her for him, so that the Virgin he painted would be most perfect, and then …”
The other student took it up.
“… he ran off with her! Stole the nun right out of the convent, ran off with her and her sister, mind you, her blood-kindred sister, and has set up his household right over his shop, he and his nun and her sister, the three of them, the monk and the two nuns … and lives in sin with her, Lucrezia Buti, and paints the Virgin on the altarpiece and does not give a damn what anyone thinks.”
There was jostling and pushing in the crowd about us. Men told us to be quiet. The students were choking on their laughter.
“If he didn’t have Cosimo,” said the first student, lowering his voice in an obedient but mischievous whisper, “they’d string him up, I mean her family, the Buti, would at least, if not the priests of the Carmelite Order, if not the whole damned town.”
The other student shook his head and covered his mouth not to laugh out loud.
The speaker, far ahead, advised all to remain calm and let this scandal and outrage be handled by the proper authorities, for everyone knew that nowhere in all of Florence was there a painter any greater than Fra Filippo, and that Cosimo would tend to this in his own time.
“He’s always been tormented,” said the student beside me.
“Tormented,” I whispered. “Tormented.” His face came back to me, the monk glimpsed years ago in Cosimo’s house in the Via Larga, the man arguing so fiercely to be free, only to be with a woman for a little while. I felt the strangest conflict within, the strangest darkest fear. “Oh, that they don’t hurt him again.”
“One might wonder,” came a soft voice in my ear. I turned, but I saw no one who could have spoken to me. Ursula looked about.
“What is it, Vittorio?”
But I knew the whisper, and it came again, bodiless and intimate, “One might wonder, where were his guardian angels on the day that Fra Filippo did such a mad thing?”
I turned in a mad frantic circle, searching for the origin of the voice. Men backed away from me and made little gestures of annoyance. I snatched up Ursula’s hand and made for the doors.
Only when I was outside in the piazza did my heart stop pounding. I had not known that with this new blood I could feel such anxiety and misery and fear.
“Oh, run off with a nun to paint the Virgin!” I cried out under my breath.
“Don’t cry, Vittorio,” she said.
&n
bsp; “Don’t speak to me as if I were your little brother!” I said to her, and then was full of shame. She was stricken by my words, as if I’d slapped her. I took her fingers and kissed them. “I’m sorry, Ursula, I am sorry.”
I pulled her along beside me.
“But where are we going?”
“To the house of Fra Filippo, to his workshop. Don’t question me now.”
Within moments we had found our way, echoing and clattering down the narrow street, and we stood before the doors that were shut up and I could see no light, save in the third-story windows, as though he had had to flee to that height with his bride.
No mob was gathered here.
But out of the darkness there came suddenly a handful of filth heaved at the bolted doors, and then another and then a volley of stones. I stepped back, shielding Ursula, and watched as one passerby after another slunk forward and hurled his insults at the shop.
Finally, I lay against the wall opposite, staring dully in the darkness, and I heard the deep-throated bell of the church ring the hour of eleven, which meant surely that all men must vacate the streets.
Ursula only waited on me and said nothing, and she noted it quietly when I looked up and saw the last of Fra Filippo’s lights go out.
“It’s my doing,” I said. “I took his angels from him, and he fell into this folly, and for what did I do it, for what, that I might possess you as surely now as he possesses his nun?”
“I don’t know your meaning, Vittorio,” she said. “What are nuns and priests to me? I have never said a word to wound you, never, but I say such words now. Don’t stand here weeping over these mortals you loved. We are wedded now, and no convent vow or priestly anointment divides us. Let’s go away from here, and when by light of lamps you want to show me the wonders of this painter, then bring me, bring me to see the angels of which you spoke rendered in pigment and oil.”
I was chastened by her firmness. I kissed her hand again. I told her I was sorry. I held her to my heart.
How long I might have stood with her there, I don’t know. Moments passed. I heard the sound of running water and distant footsteps, but nothing of consequence, nothing which mattered in the thick night of crowded Florence, with its four- and five-story palaces, with its old half-broken towers, and its churches, and its thousands upon thousands of sleeping souls.