by Ann Hood
“Perhaps after dinner,” Lorenzo said.
Clarice sighed. “I suppose I have no choice.”
To Maisie’s surprise, Clarice took her hand.
“You will sit next to me,” Clarice announced. “And you can tell me how you got such beautiful hair and skin.”
Maisie smiled as she and Clarice walked hand in hand to the banquet table.
But Signor Ficino grabbed her by the shoulder, pressed his lips to her ear, and whispered, “Where are you from?”
Startled, Maisie yanked away from his grip.
“I will find out,” he said coldly.
Clarice laughed. “He’s full of doom and gloom,” she said, tugging Maisie along again. “He’s an astrologer, and he’s always saying dire or ridiculous things. He told me I would have ten children! And he told my poor brother-in-law that he would be murdered right in the piazza!”
“That is pretty gloomy,” Maisie agreed.
But Clarice was already smiling—and changing the subject happily.
“I just love berlingaccio, don’t you?” she said, letting a servant pull back one of the heavy chairs, and sitting with a bounce.
Maisie nodded and smiled back at Clarice, but she couldn’t help but notice Signor Ficino watching her.
“I don’t understand,” Leonardo said sadly to Felix. “Explain more clearly why I can’t come with you to the future.”
The sky above Florence had turned from blue to lilac to lavender, now an inky blue studded with stars.
“There are rules,” Felix said, struggling to explain. “For one, you have to be a Pickworth.”
“What is this Pickworth?”
“It’s our name. Like yours is da Vinci,” Felix said.
Leonardo frowned. “So you are from Pickworth?”
“Well, no. I mean, kind of,” Felix said. “Pickworth was our great-great-grandfather’s name. And probably his father’s name, and so on.”
“But da Vinci simply means that I am from the village of Vinci. You are not from the village of Pickworth?”
“Honestly,” Felix sighed, “I have no idea. In the future, we don’t do it that way.”
“Well, suppose I become a Pickworth—”
“No, no,” Felix protested, “it doesn’t work that way. And even if it did, you have to be a twin to time travel.”
“Why?”
Felix shrugged. “I have no idea.”
He remembered how he’d gone to The Treasure Chest and tried to take Lily Goldberg with him, and how it had failed. Even the thought of Lily Goldberg sent a sharp pain of embarrassment through him. Had she received that letter? Did she find him pathetic?
“What else?” Leonardo was asking.
“We go into this room called The Treasure Chest,” Felix said, happy to not think about Lily Goldberg, “and we take an object—”
“What does that mean?”
“The Treasure Chest is full of . . . of stuff. Scrolls and coins and precious jewels and feathers and crowns and maps and test tubes and compasses and . . . seals . . .”
He looked at Leonardo’s expectant face. If Felix had that seal, he would give it to him right now. But Maisie had it.
“That’s how we got here,” Felix said. “With a seal of the city of Florence. And we need to give it to you.”
“Fine, then,” Leonardo said. “Give it to me. Maybe then I can come back to the future with you.”
“No,” Felix said, shaking his head. “Once we give it to you, we’ll go back. Just Maisie and me.”
“Impossible!” Leonardo said vehemently. “There must be a way!”
“Actually, that’s not exactly right,” Felix said. “We give you the seal, and you give us advice.”
“What kind of advice?” Leonardo said. “I have no advice for you. Or for anyone.”
“Not so much advice,” Felix said, “but like a lesson. Something that will help us when we go back.”
A slow grin spread over Leonardo’s face.
“Excellent,” he said. “Then I will be sure not to give you any lessons. Until I figure out how to return with you.”
“No!” Felix said adamantly. “We need to go home. We have a family and school and . . .”
“And?”
“It’s complicated,” Felix said.
Leonardo waited.
“Our great-uncle, he’s dying. But by time traveling, we can save his life.”
“How?”
Again Felix struggled. “I don’t really understand it,” he said, “but every time we time travel, he gets . . . not younger . . . but healthier? More vital.”
“So if you don’t go back?”
“He’ll . . .” Felix’s voice caught. “He’ll die.”
“I will take this under consideration,” Leonardo said finally. “Is the life of this uncle of yours more important than seeing what the future holds?”
He stood.
“We are late, and Lorenzo and the rest of them will assume I’ve forgotten the berlingaccio.”
Felix stood, too.
“Leonardo,” he said, “you belong here. Your ideas need to grow from this place, this time. The Renaissance—”
Leonardo interrupted. “Renaissance? Rebirth?”
Felix nodded. “That’s what this era will be called. The Renaissance. A rebirth of ideas and art after the Dark Ages.”
“Renaissance,” Leonardo said to himself. “I like it.”
When Leonardo and Felix arrived, the multicourse dinner of soup and pasta and meat and cheese had finished. The servants were just putting several ring-shaped cakes on the table for dessert.
“Ah!” Leonardo said after everyone had greeted him. “We didn’t miss the berlingozzo!”
“Almost,” Sandro kidded.
Maisie tried to make eye contact with Felix, but he had his worried look on his face, and she couldn’t get past that.
The cake tasted like lemons and sugar, and Maisie happily accepted a second piece once she’d finished her first. But Felix merely moved the crumbs around on his plate.
“Come,” Leonardo told him quietly, “there’s something I want to show you.”
They easily slipped away from the others and walked up the stairs to the family’s quarters.
“You know,” Leonardo said as they walked past giant tapestries, endless bookshelves that seemed to stretch forever, and more marble and gold than Felix had seen in any of the Newport mansions. “If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion, you belong only half to yourself. With that many people, even less.”
Felix brightened. That sounded important, like a lesson. Maybe Leonardo had inadvertently told him something important, the very thing he and Maisie needed to go home.
“Here,” Leonardo said, opening a door.
Felix gazed at the room. It looked like a church, complete with an altar. But it was the most beautiful church he’d ever seen.
“The Magi Chapel,” Leonardo said, his voice hushed. “Frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli.”
Felix took in the frescoes that covered the walls. He recognized the scene of the Three Wise Men, but . . .
“Hey!” he said.
Leonardo laughed. “That’s right. The Wise Men are the Medicis.”
Felix recognized Lorenzo, with his black pageboy haircut and dark eyes.
“That’s his brother, Giuliano, and his father, the two other Wise Men. The other characters are various emperors,” Leonardo explained.
Felix nodded appreciatively.
From down in the courtyard, a sudden burst of voices and shouting rose up to them.
“Don’t worry,” Leonardo said, “they are just in the spirit of Carnival.”
Almost as soon as Felix and Leon
ardo left, Lorenzo stood and recited a poem. It seemed to be about life and happiness but also about how those things can change so easily.
Sandro watched Maisie’s face intently as Lorenzo recited.
“How can it be?” he asked softly.
Maisie turned her attention away from Lorenzo and toward Sandro.
“How can you understand Tuscan?” he asked her.
“I was wondering the same thing,” Signor Ficino said.
“Tuscan is Italian, isn’t it?” Maisie asked as she fingered the shard hanging cool against her skin.
“No,” Sandro said, narrowing his eyes. “Tuscan is the language here, little used now. That is why I wonder how you can understand it.”
“They don’t speak Tuscan anywhere but in Tuscany,” Signor Ficino said in that cold voice of his.
“Well,” Maisie said.
“Yes?” Sandro asked expectantly.
“I’m a linguist.”
Sandro frowned.
“A linguist!” Maisie repeated. “I speak so many languages I can’t even name them all.”
“But Tuscan?” Signor Ficino said.
Before she could answer, the front door burst open and a dozen men infiltrated the courtyard, wielding large swords and screaming, “Revenge!”
The men around the table, along with Lorenzo’s new wife, Clarice, and Maisie, jumped to their feet and dispersed, some running through the small door to the garden, some running up the stairs to the family’s quarters.
The intruders slashed at the air with their swords, cutting down the middle of the table, sending glass and food spraying everywhere.
Maisie stood, paralyzed.
Where was Felix?
But she had no time to think. The intruders, their faces covered in black hoods, their dark robes flapping as they set about smashing everything on the table, were in a frenzy, their swords slicing the air wildly.
She needed to get away.
One sword came so close to her that she actually heard the whoosh it made as it flew past. Her fingers shot up to her neck. Close? No. It had actually nicked her. Two small dots of blood were on her finger where she’d touched her neck.
Her heart pounding in her ears, Maisie dropped to the floor unnoticed and slithered under the table, watching as the men’s black boots moved frantically back and forth.
“We should go upstairs and murder the lot of them!” an angry male voice said.
The men murmured in agreement.
“All in good time,” another man said. “We’ve let the Medicis know that the Pazzis mean business.”
Someone laughed a laugh so evil that the hairs on Maisie’s arms stood up.
“At least let’s take a souvenir,” the first man said.
Maisie heard them marching around the courtyard, trying to decide which painting to take with them.
Finally, they left in as much noisy chaos as they’d arrived.
Maisie stayed beneath the table for a few minutes after the courtyard grew silent.
When she believed they were truly gone and not returning, she slid on her belly along the marble floor and emerged from beneath the table. Her heart was still pounding, so much so that she didn’t hear the small sound of something dropping to the floor as she stood. She touched her neck again and found tiny drops of fresh blood there.
I’ve been wounded by a sword! Maisie thought, with some pride.
She wished she knew where Felix was so that she could show him, and maybe brag a little about her bravery. She had been brave, she decided. Standing amidst all those slashing swords, hiding under the table, emerging safe but bloody. The story grew even as she stood there, waiting for someone to come downstairs.
Eventually, she gave up.
Maisie had had enough excitement for one day, she decided. She would go back to Verrocchio’s studio and wait for Felix and Leonardo to return. By then, her story would be even grander.
CHAPTER 10
NON CAPISCO
Maisie went to sleep alone that night, Felix and Leonardo still not yet home. She woke the next morning alone again, but the blankets beside her were tangled and messy, so Felix had come back eventually. But he had already gone off again. Probably with Leonardo to prove some scientific theory or another, Maisie thought with a sad sigh.
She made her way through the studio, empty except for the canvases leaning against the walls and the tables lined with painting supplies.
“Hello?” Maisie called, her voice echoing ever so slightly.
No one answered.
Of course, she realized, today was the first day of Carnival. Everyone had gone off to watch jousting and parades.
Her mood shifted immediately from lonely to angry. Couldn’t Felix have woken her up? How dare he just leave her alone while he went to see jousting. Or whatever.
Her stomach growled, reminding her that in addition to being angry, she was also hungry.
In the sunny kitchen, Maisie found half a loaf of bread on a cutting board, some bright orange jam, and a bowl of figs. She helped herself to all of it, even though figs were kind of hairy inside and tasted like practically nothing. Chewing a hard slice of the bread slathered with jam, she got madder and madder. It was one thing to flee sword-wielding Pazzis—whatever that was—and quite another to simply flee.
Maisie worked herself into such a fit of anger that she almost didn’t see the note sticking out from beneath the wooden cutting board.
Well, she thought, feeling a teeny-tiny bit less mad, at least they left her a note.
She slid it out and stared at the writing on it. Immediately, Maisie recognized it as Leonardo’s strange backward scrawling. But she didn’t recognize even one word written there.
Frowning, Maisie tried to sound out the letters.
Ciao.
That was the only one she recognized because everyone knew ciao meant good-bye.
But shouldn’t this ciao read as good-bye?
Up until this very instant, everything in Italian, or Tuscan, or Latin sounded like English to Maisie. And everything written in those languages appeared in English to her.
This note, however, was most definitely not in English. Maisie considered this.
Maybe it had something to do with the odd way that Leonardo wrote. His backward writing, all the letters jammed up close together, could possibly be just gibberish rather than any language at all.
Yes, she decided, this note was simply impossible to read.
Even though it probably had specific instructions on when and where to meet Felix and Leonardo, it was completely useless.
Like a lightbulb going off in a cartoon, an idea quickly came to Maisie.
Clutching the note, she ran to Leonardo’s room. Inside, she went to the small mirror that hung above the table in one corner. The table had a ceramic pitcher sitting in a ceramic bowl on top of it, and a cotton towel draped across one corner. But it was the mirror that she needed.
Standing on tiptoe, Maisie lifted the note so that it was reflected there. That backward writing would appear forward now, she thought, congratulating herself on her brilliance.
Except even reflected in the mirror and reading it from left to right like regular writing, the words were still not in English.
There was ciao again. And her own name was legible now. And there were two signatures—Felix and Leonardo.
Everything else, Maisie saw, getting angry all over again, was in a language that was not English.
Confused, she balled the note up and stuck it in her pocket. Feeling how empty it was in there, she remembered dropping the seal into the urn last night. For the first time since she’d done that, she wondered if maybe that had been a bad idea. No, she decided as she made her way out of the bedroom and back to the studio, when the time came to go home she would just go back to the Palazzo Medici
and retrieve it. Better to take one problem at a time, Maisie thought. For now, she would have to venture into the city and find Felix and Leonardo.
Felix glanced nervously around the crowd. From his special seat in the grandstand that held the Medicis and other nobility, he had a perfect view of everything—the Piazza Santa Croce below, the priests and dukes and other high-ranking officials of Florence around him, the bright, round colorful tents below that Leonardo had told him held the jousters, and the steaming crowd of what Sandro referred to—with a sneer—as commoners. Maisie was not anywhere to be seen.
Surely she had woken up by now and read the note telling her to come here to the Medici box. Why, Felix thought, did his sister have to be so difficult?
Felix sat between Piero and Leonardo. Although Piero seemed engaged in the goings-on below, Leonardo had one of his notebooks opened and had spent his time so far working on a sketch of a horse. He drew and studied what he drew and then, dissatisfied, rubbed off a line here and a line there, only to try again. Behind him, Sandro searched for a glimpse of someone named Simonetta. And beside Sandro sat Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice. Other men from last night’s supper were there, too, as well as women in damask and embroidered dresses.
But no Maisie.
“Morello di Vento has to win,” Clarice said.
“Doesn’t he always?” Sandro asked.
Leonardo leaned close to Felix and whispered, “That’s Lorenzo’s magnificent roan. He’s won every race since Lorenzo took over from his father.”
“The horses run from the Porta al Prato, through the Borgo Ognissanti, and end here,” Piero explained. “That’s why this is the most exciting place to be.”
Horses began to near the Piazza Santa Croce.
Excited, everyone jumped to their feet.
Although most had riders in elaborate clothing, some horses were riderless. The riders wore spurs to goad the horses into running faster. By the time they reached the Piazza Santa Croce, the horses were in such a frenzy that some of them seemed to have gone mad. They foamed at the mouth and stood on their hind legs. Felix watched as several riders were thrown from their horses’ backs.