The Competition

by Donna Russo Morin

  With a snarl of his own, the man lunged at Sansone. Bigger, faster, Sansone dodged the outstretched arms deftly. The man found nothing but himself in a chokehold in the arms of one of the Otto di Guardia.

  “Grazie.” Sansone dipped his head to the guard.

  “Prego, paesano,” the guard replied, pleasing Sansone as he acknowledged him as one of their own.

  He forgot the man and his rancor at the sight awaiting him within.

  The Disciples, all save Lapaccia, whose health had confined her to her bed, had after a day and a half finished their work with the Greek wine. The chapel and all its frescoes were not returned to their pristine glory, but there were but wraiths remaining of the splotches.

  “Now we are to work with linseed and walnut oil.” Viviana took the packages from Sansone and showed him their work.

  “And will that remove the rest?” he asked as he strode about the chapel, forced to lean close to the walls to see the faint stains—ghosts that continued to mock.

  “Not entirely, but it will make them ever more transparent. It renders paint thin and translucent,” Viviana asserted. “Where the fresco colors are deep and dark, it may be enough.”

  “And where it is not?”

  The light in her eyes dimmed. “In those places we will be forced to repaint.”

  He looked down at her, at the hollows beneath her eyes, at the thinness of her lovely, curved body. “All that in the two days remaining? Can you do it?”

  “Two days and two nights,” she avowed. “We can and we will.”

  Viviana gave his arm a squeeze, leaving him to return to her work, muttering to herself when he could not hear, “I pray we will.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Secrets and fears once whispered, become strengths.”

  Night had fallen upon them darkly.

  Every candle, oil lamp, and lantern they could find staved it off. They were shadows within the light. Hovering apparitions that swayed and drifted, seeming to float, not walk, as the work moved them from wall to wall.

  Most of the others—their families and friends—had gone home to their beds; only three remained, there but not. Sansone, Leonardo, and Patrizio were soundly asleep. They slumped on the floor, their backs to the wall just outside the chapel. Fiammetta peered down at them fondly as she passed, returning from the studio, clasping fresh brushes.

  “Viviana?” she called softly. “Come see, Viviana.”

  Carrying her brush with its bristles of wheat pigment, Viviana answered her call.

  “Ah, sweet,” she whispered tenderly.

  Leonardo’s lips sputtered with snorting exhalations. Patrizio had shifted in his sleep, his head finding rest upon Sansone’s shoulder. If Sansone knew it was there, he did nothing to move it.

  “Sì,” Fiammetta marveled. “They are sweet men.” She pulled her gaze from the three slumbering forms to face Viviana. “Sansone is a sweet man. He does love you,” she said to the woman beside her. Or did she speak to herself, announcing a discovery of her own to herself?

  Surprise and then fondness came over Viviana’s face.

  “He is, Fiammetta, the sweetest man I have ever known.”

  “Then you must not let anyone pull you from him,” Fiammetta insisted. “Not even me.”

  It was as close as the contessa could get to an apology, a retraction of words that had come before. It was as close as she would come to giving Viviana her blessing.

  “You are both dearly blessed.” They had not heard Isabetta creep up on them, but both heard the longing in her voice.

  “Love will find you again, Isabetta.” Viviana pulled her into their small circle. “You must have faith.”

  “Faith.” Isabetta blew out a breath with a small shake of her head, and slipped back into the chapel. They followed her.

  “Faith is not something you can conjure, not something I can conjure,” she mourned. “I know only what life has given me and what it has not. In these messages, my expectations have formed.”

  “Did you fall in love with Il Magnifico?” Mattea did not cease her work upon the wall, nor did she ignore the conversation.

  “Ack, no,” Isabetta rejoined, though her gaze held more than denial. “I loved his body, his hands, and what they made me feel. But I could never love a soul such as his.”

  “That is true love, is it not?” Natasia whispered from the tallest scaffold. “We are drawn in by their beauty, their words, but love does not come till all the layers are folded back and the true soul of the man is shown to us.”

  Viviana climbed up on the scaffold beside her. “You have become rich with wisdom, my friend.”

  Natasia shrugged. “Does one become wise, or is wisdom thrust upon us?” She shrugged again. “I did not love Pagolo when first I met him, when our betrothal was arranged. I was besotted with the folderol of the marriage ceremony, with becoming a wife. I thought little about love, true love.”

  Work stopped. Their hands could not move when their minds were so engaged with other matters.

  “Nor can I say I loved him through the years of waiting for him to return from war, though I made a good show of it,” Natasia lamented. “It was only after we were married and living as man and wife that my love for him revealed itself.”

  “How?” Patrizia whispered the short, if monumental question.

  Natasia turned to her, features soft and wistful. “I woke up one morning and he had already left. When I took myself to table to break my fast, I found a note from him.”

  “What did it say?” Carina coaxed.

  “It said, ‘You are always beautiful, but when you sleep you are a beautiful angel.’” Natasia shook her head even as she grinned. “It was the spark. It was enough.”

  “I thought Patrizio looked like a gnome,” Fiammetta squawked; giggles followed. “I fought against the betrothal from the first moment my father informed me of it.”

  “Mother!” Patrizia protested.

  “You did not,” Isabetta objected.

  “Oh indeed I did, but I did my duty as I was taught to do. Well, almost,” Fiammetta insisted. “Our marriage was not consummated for months, though not for his lack of trying.”

  “You love him dearly now, I know it to be true,” Viviana interposed. “What changed?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” Fiammetta looked beyond the confines of the chapel. “I suppose it was his refusal to be refused. He courted me though we were already married. He was charming.”

  “A charming gnome?” Mattea grinned.

  “The most charming gnome I have ever met,” Fiammetta’s plump cheeks dimpled.

  “I loved my husband from the first moment I saw him,” Isabetta began. “I was swept away by him, by it. Swept away from my family and my home in Venice. I do not remember when I stopped loving him, but it was long before he became ill. I was a child when I met him, when I fell in love with him. And then I became a woman. I always loved him, but somewhere in our life together I was no longer in love with him.”

  “You need not punish yourself for it,” Viviana intoned. “Many happy marriages exist with no more than that.”

  “I know, I do know,” Isabetta mused. “Still. He deserved better.”

  “We all deserve to be loved, but our first love should always be for ourselves,” Viviana decreed. “Without self-love and self-respect, we show others how they may treat us.”

  Words faded to grunts, and talking to painting. They brushed respect on the walls as they would on their lives.

  Chapter Forty

  “When one thing is revealed, many others may follow.”

  The crowd of people in front of Santo Spirito had never been larger. The line of those eager to enter its doors was far greater than it had ever been for any mass or service. It snaked through the piazza and down both the Via delle Caldaie and the Via del Gelsumino. Like a snake, much of it was poisonous.

  Never before had the need for the Otto been greater; never before had they been on duty whilst inside a ch
urch. All eight of the guards stood in attendance, including the eldest, whose place Sansone would take. Four stationed themselves outside at the doors, and the other four waited inside, awaiting the arrival of Il Magnifico.

  The Disciples fussed with each other’s gowns and headpieces; they had had but a few hours after laying the last stroke of the brush, hours snatched only at dawn. They flew to their homes, quickly washed and dressed for the occasion, only to fly back, having agreed that they would await each and every arrival, that no one should be there before them. Father Raffaello had guarded the chapel hid behind its concealing cloth, lest a curious citizen or vengeful vandal impinge upon its secrecy.

  “You have done it, madonnas? You have completed the work?” Such was the greeting of Antonio di Salvestro de Serristori. Upon his gangly legs, he rushed toward them and his chapel, his eyes beseeching, his voice squeaking.

  “Of course they have, cara.” Fabia de Salvestro took her husband’s arm. “Would they all be standing here looking as pretty as a portrait themselves if they had not?”

  Her words did not stop Antonio, but they did slow him.

  “We have finished, signore,” Viviana spoke for the group, a group that had agreed their sponsor need know nothing about what they had endured to complete his commission. “We believe you will be well and truly pleased.”

  “Ah, sì,” Antonio exhaled sharply, scrawny chest filling and collapsing. “You do know that he is coming? You have been told?”

  “Lorenzo informed me himself, signore,” da Vinci assured him. “All is ready for him. You have seen the guards?”

  “Indeed I have,” Antonio stormed. “I never expected such a deplorable reaction. I knew, that is to say, I thought there would be those who struggled with the notion of women artists, but such anger?” He shook his head shamefully. Would he have been such a man, with such anger, were it someone else’s chapel? “I would not have put you through such an ordeal had I seen it coming.”

  “Then it is well that you did not,” Isabetta contested. “For if you had stopped us, not only would you not be able to boast one of the finest frescoes in all of Florence, you would have stopped progress itself. And you are nothing, signore, if not a progressive man.”

  Viviana clamped her teeth upon her lips, willing them not to curve upward. Leonardo coughed. They knew her sweetness for what it truly was.

  “If you would be so kind, signore,” Father Raffaello interjected, “could you stand at the door and tell the guards who should, and more importantly, who should not be let in? It would be a great assistance to us all.”

  “Of course, of course.” Antonio rushed away as quickly as he had come, puffed up in his role as host and sponsor.

  “The time, brother,” Natasia pleaded with the priest, who looked about the chapel at the shadows of the sun.

  “Nearly there,” he answered. “A handful of minutes, no more.”

  The women clasped hands; the time of reckoning had come.

  From the front of the church, they could see their sponsor pointing to people in the crowd, could hear him informing the guards, “Him, her, them.”

  As the crowd trickled in, the Disciples stood in a resolute line before the hanging cloth, donning their widest smiles, no matter that their faces felt as if they would crack, nodding to those they recognized, and some they didn’t. Footsteps beat upon the stone, each clack a tick of time. Low murmurs became a hum, filling the church, like the hum in the artists’ ears, filling their heads. On some faces, they saw approval. Their family and friends stood before them in the front row; the women needed them there, needed to see their faces more than any others.

  What Viviana saw was a sight that made her forget all the hours of aching work, all the heartache. Rudolfo stood on one side of Sansone, Marcello on the other. They were not her sons and her lover; they were her family. Any questions that may have lingered, she banished to the past along with all the pain of it, where such doubts belonged.

  “This way, Magnifico.”

  Antonio’s words of greeting, louder than any he had spoken yet, erased all thoughts. All eyes turned. Viviana wondered how many attended to see the fresco and how many attended to see them.

  Lorenzo de’ Medici walked up the side aisle, his wife’s hand resting upon his raised one.

  Il Magnifico wore the red gown and berretto of his office in the Signoria; his wife wore all black.

  Clarice Orsini de’ Medici had lived a little more than thirty years. She had married Lorenzo when she was but sixteen. In the few years since, she had given birth to ten children, three of which had already passed on. Her beauty had taken on a dark-edged humanity.

  She walked straight and tall beside her husband; her grand ghirlanda covered all her hair, its thick braid of velvet with its gold thread formed a U above her head, its ends reaching just beyond her shoulders. Her black velvet gown, belted high beneath her breasts, did much to hide her widened body. Her countenance did much to intimidate.

  Viviana looked sideways at the woman beside her; Isabetta straightened her shoulders and held her head high. Viviana squeezed her hand before dropping it as they all dropped into a curtsy before the commanding couple.

  “Ah, le donne artiste, the day has arrived and you have all survived.” Lorenzo stepped before each and every one of them, greeting them all, lifting each woman from her bow. If he lingered a tad longer before Isabetta, no one noticed, save for Viviana and his wife. “Are you ready for what comes next, no matter what it may be?”

  Viviana stifled any urge to harangue him for his persisting doubt.

  “We are ready, Magnifico,” Isabetta testified. “And we know what comes next. We are sure of it.”

  Lorenzo snickered with a slight shake of his head. He leaned in closer to the Disciples and whispered, “For all our sakes, I hope you speak true.”

  Encouragement came then, but not from Lorenzo.

  “I am in awe of your bravery, madonnas,” Clarice Orsini de’ Medici said, her voice soft and high-pitched, her diction fittingly perfect. “I cannot say I understand why you felt it must be done, but I applaud you your convictions.”

  “Grazie, signora,” Viviana answered for the group with another quick curtsy, believing Clarice to be done. She was not.

  Instead, she leaned in close to Isabetta, and lowered her voice, though not so low that Viviana, beside them, did not hear.

  “I envy you, not for what you had of my husband, but what you have for yourself.”

  Isabetta looked upon the woman in a way Viviana would never have imagined she would; Isabetta looked upon her former lover’s wife with respect.

  “Come visit our studio, madonna. You would be most welcome.”

  Clarice tilted her head with one brow raised. “Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I will bring some of my daughters.”

  The creaking of the doors closing squelched the vociferous chatter that had been filling the church, muting it as it marked the moment.

  Antonio and Fabia rushed back up the aisle to stand beside the Medicis. Antonio wore upon his face the same fear that churned in Viviana’s stomach. He gathered himself, prodded by the elbow of his wife, cleared his throat, and addressed the assembly, one that filled every corner of the basilica.

  “Thank you all,” he began.

  “Louder,” Fabia whispered.

  Antonio raised his head upon his scrawny neck, tossing his voice to the back row.

  “Thank you all so very much for coming. I know what we have done may seem a bit outlandish.”

  “What we have done?” Viviana heard Fiammetta huff, turned and saw Natasia poke her elbow into Fiammetta’s ribs.

  “However we felt the tenderness of the subject matter required a tender touch.” Antonio continued, “These women”—he gestured back and across to the Disciples—“these artists are extreme talents despite that they are of the fairer sex.”

  How does one look complimented at such an insult?

  It took all of Viviana’s strength not to ask the qu
estion.

  “I have no doubt what they have created is a masterpiece. And I am sure you are all as anxious to see it as I am.”

  The rafters shook with resounding agreement, even if some of it came in hopes of disaster.

  Antonio laughed, once more oblivious to all the types of truth filling the church. “Very well then. Fabia?”

  His wife nodded and took her place on one side of the cloth, while Antonio took the other side.

  Expectancy swallowed them whole; the entire church seemed to be holding its breath.

  With a nod of Antonio’s head, they pulled. With their pull the cloth fell.

  The cloth fell on silence; a loud, deep, frightening silence.

  “What do we—” Patrizia croaked to her mother, but she didn’t finish, she need not.

  The applause began then, not with hesitant, sporadic claps, but with a spark of lightning and the fury of thunder. The cheering came—rousing, vibrant, brilliant cheering.

  Viviana closed teary eyes; she would capture this moment, make it hers to be brought out again and again whenever she doubted herself or the purpose of Da Vinci’s Disciples.

  “Dio mio,” Antonio di Salvestro de’ Serristori blasphemed. He blinked and blinked again. He looked at the women artists and back to the fresco. As the rousing adulation washed over them, he flitted his gaze between the women and the fresco again and again. He stepped to them and bowed.

  “I am not the most intelligent man, nor the strongest, but I should never, ever, have doubted you. Do you forgive me, madonnas?”

  Fiammetta stepped forward, placed a hand upon his head as if she were the Pope blessing him. “You know only what you have been taught. You have been taught something different today. Now you must teach it.”

  Antonio rose, wonder still blanching his face. “I will. I swear I will.”

  He stood tall once more, raised his head, his voice, once more. “Da Vinci’s Disciples!”