The Botticelli Secret

by Marina Fiorato

  “Ah, the feast. Yes, I was otherwise engaged, I’m afraid.” Niccolò’s pale eyes, weak in color as a winter sky compared to my friend’s summer blue, went to the door through which the catamite had left. “But I hope my absence did not ruin your feast. Nor the tourney that preceded it.” Tok had been busy with his information. “And who is this little poppet? Very pretty.” Niccolò’s eyes flickered over me without interest. I shifted a little, wondering if he could smell the fishy fumes from my oyster-soaked skirt and would mistake the odor for the similar one of sex. He did. “Broken your vows already? Or is she a little gift for my father’s grace, to win yourself some favor?”

  Brother Guido flinched at the mention of Lord Silvio, visibly swallowed his dislike, and took his cousin’s hand, a gesture which sent Niccolò’s pale eyebrows right up into his neatly dressed bangs. “I bring grave news, cousin. I’m afraid my lord your father is . . . dead.” The word choked Brother Guido a little and even my stony heart melted, not for the son but for the nephew. Nevertheless, I waited for the tears and lamentations of the della Torre heir: perhaps he would throw himself prostrate and sobbing, over the couch he had recently defiled? I did not expect what came—the smallest ghost of a smile playing at the corners of the weak mouth.

  “Dead, you say?” He picked up the jewel he wore about his neck and tapped it on yellow teeth. “Really.”

  Brother Guido did a very bad job of hiding his shock and disgust. “There is more. He said”—the monk lowered his voice—“his last word was ‘murder.’ ”

  Niccolò seemed intrigued. “Murder? The English word?”

  Brother Guido nodded. “Yes. For remember that we had an English confessor, some years back, Brother Giles of Cambridge? He taught my uncle the language, to further his business dealings, and taught us English in the schoolroom too? I’m convinced that my uncle spoke English as a code at the last, so that others might not know his meaning. He was telling us he was killed by another’s hand.” Ah, that’s why I didn’t have a clue what he meant, for I have less English than a Scotsman. But as Brother Guido slid his blue eyes to the door, where Tok lounged in the doorframe, I suddenly knew that it was not from myself that Lord Silvio wished to hide the meaning of his final words. “And then,” Brother Guido continued, “then he told me to ‘follow the light.’ ”

  I waited for Brother Guido to mention the gold thumb ring that Lord Silvio bequeathed to his nephew at his last, but nothing more was said. Now I thought about it, Brother Guido kept his left hand beneath the voluminous sleeves of his habit—well out of sight. I shrugged mentally—mayhap the monk wished to hold on to this keepsake of his uncle’s and feared that to reveal it would be to lose it. (Fair enough.) My thoughts were rudely interrupted as the new head of the della Torre family laughed in earnest, an unpleasant honking sound that would have sat better in the throat of a Christmas goose than a new-dubbed lord. “Murder? How priceless! My father murdered! Perhaps I did it, did I?”

  We were silent as he enjoyed his own wit.

  “No, I’m afraid I did not, though ofttimes I thought of it.” Niccolò coughed twice to collect himself, and wiped his streaming eyes. “Now, cousin, I am going to give you an object lesson in why I am the intellectual of the family, with an academic education, and you are fit for nothing but wearing out your sandal leather pacing the cloister.”

  I felt stung to retort that Brother Guido had read more books than any fellow I had ever met, but Niccolò seemed absorbed in his own rhetoric. He fitted his thumbs in the facings of his gown like an attorney-at-law. “What did my father actually say with his last, unlamented breath?”

  Brother Guido shifted his feet. “I told you, he grabbed my cowl, pulled me close, and said, ‘Murder.’ He said it twice, and then said, ‘Follow the light.’ ”

  “Murder?” said Niccolò, still playing the lawyer’s part. “Or Muda?”

  Brother Guido’s dark eyebrows drew together “It . . . I suppose . . . he may have said that word.”

  I hated to agree with Niccolò, but his rendering of his father’s last word did sound more authentic.

  “It did sound more like ‘Muda,’ “ I put in. “I mean, I have no English to speak of, unless you count curse words I learned from the merchants I’ve screwed, but . . .” I trailed off.

  The cousins still locked eyes as if I had not spoken and Brother Guido filled the silence. “Why would he say ‘Muda’? What does it mean? I have never heard the word.”

  Niccolò smiled grimly. “My dear coz. Just because you have not heard a word, does not call its existence into question. It is a word, and a place too. This is the Muda.” He gestured outward and circled his weak wrists to encompass the chamber.

  “This room?” Brother Guido’s confusion was apparent.

  “This building, this house, this tower in which we stand. It is named the Muda.” A hateful smile played on Niccolò’s lips.

  “I don’t understand,” Brother Guido faltered.

  Nor did I.

  Niccolò flourished his surcoat like an attorney, enjoying himself. “Let me furnish you with a little local history, since you have clearly been gone too long. This tower was the very place where our distant ancestor, Ugolino della Gherardesca, was imprisoned for treason with his two nephews. In this very room they were starved for ninety days, in a state of desperate gnawing hunger.” Niccolò moved closer, his voice heavy with threat. “You must remember the tale, cousin. The eldest of his nephews”—he gave the word a deadly emphasis—“feeling himself near death, begged his uncle to gnaw on his flesh to sustain himself. And so here, in this very room, Ugolino ate his beloved nephew alive.”

  There was no mistaking the malice now. I shivered as in my mind’s eye the finery melted away and the tower was once again a cold stone prison where such unspeakable things came to pass. Niccolò’s pale eyes glittered, enjoying the vision, and I felt my friend to be in danger and thanked the stars for the presence of Tok.

  But Brother Guido met his cousin’s gaze unwaveringly, with a courage that made me like him even better. “Of course I know of the tale. Ugolino’s atrocity was well documented in the Thirteenth Canto of Dante’s Inferno, when he meets the poet in the seventh circle of hell.” I could have cheered as Brother Guido won the book-learning contest. “I merely did not know that this place was named Muda.”

  Niccolò, discomfited, broke his gaze and turned away, and the company relaxed somewhat. “Well, now you do,” he rejoined weakly. “I am glad to have been the instrument for your instruction. And now that you have been enlightened, even a person of your limited faculties must see that my father merely meant that you must come to the tower of Muda to tell me of his passing.”

  “And the light?” Brother Guido fought back. “Perhaps in your august knowledge, you have a notion of what my uncle meant by ‘follow the light’?”

  Niccolò had lost interest. He waved the question away. “Tok’s torch guided you here, did it not? I don’t know. Now, I have matters to attend to. Fabrizio!”

  The black child came back into the room so quickly I knew he had been listening at the door. I regarded him with contempt. An accomplished door-listener, like myself, knows well enough to leave it a few heartbeats before entering the room when summoned; it’s much less obvious.

  Brother Guido took the hint. “I will leave you alone with your grief,” he said with emphasis, and bowed with barely concealed disgust.

  We were halfway out the door, and Niccolò had already begun to stroke the boy’s hair when he fired his parting shot. “Oh, and coz? Do stay at the palazzo—as my guest—for we have much to discuss. Family matters, you understand. Don’t go anywhere, will you? Tok, see that he doesn’t.”

  Brother Guido and I both saw the look that passed between Tok and his new master as the door closed. The king is dead, long live the king. We both knew that the old order was gone and the new regime was in place; the favorite nephew was now cast down and the black sheep of the family exalted.

  I knew as wel
l as Brother Guido that Tok had been assigned to kill him.

  14

  Once outside, we meekly followed Tok for a little while, but it needed no more than a look and a little pressure of the hand to send me dashing into the dark crowd at Brother Guido’s signal. We snaked through the packed side streets, and only when we came to the riverbank, and were sure we’d lost our escort, did we lean against the balustrade, gasping for air. At last I managed, “Where now?”

  Brother Guido shook his head. “We can’t go back to the palazzo,” he said. “Our best hope is to go downriver to the Medici palace, and petition to see Lorenzo ourselves.”

  “Without your uncle’s introduction?”

  “What choice do we have? We must hope that the family name is enough. And we have the painting as collateral. Come.”

  We ran as fast as we could down the Lungarno Mediceo, weaving through the dark shuffling shapes of the saint’s-day revelers, until we saw the red mass of the Medici palace in the dying light. As I craned up at the house that loomed from the darkness—immense, forbidding, and the color of meat—I felt an extreme foreboding which almost made me open my bowels there and then. I grabbed Brother Guido’s sleeve.

  “Don’t,” I panted. “Something isn’t right.”

  “Many things, signorina. But we must do something. We cannot run forever.” He approached the grandiose steps lit by torches, where two armed guards were talking to a third man, maybe a tradesman or jongleur. But there was something familiar about the great height, the width of the shoulders. The giant turned.

  The third man was Tok.

  “It’s them!” he shouted to the guards. “Quickly!” And he gave chase.

  Shit. How had he gotten here ahead of us? We turned as one and fled back to the river, trapped by crowds at either side. (What were they all waiting for? It was as if they had all gathered to witness our capture.)

  Brother Guido led me quickly to a small private pontoon. He fumbled with the rope of the only moored boat as Tok thundered down the little pier, the planks bouncing under his weight, the two Medici guards following behind. In a flash of a blade I pulled the green glass knife from my hose and sliced the rope; one grateful glance from Brother Guido later, we collapsed in the bottom of the boat, panting like summer dogs, our lungs and limbs still aching from the chase.

  As we drifted into the midstream of the dark river we saw Tok, bent double on the pontoon, looking murder at us as we slipped from his reach. As Brother Guido fished two splintered oars from the bottom of the bark, I felt confident enough to wave sweetly as the giant became a pygmy, and then a bend in the river took him from our sight. “And now what?”

  Brother Guido was manning the tiller in an attempt to keep our vessel in the fast current. He shook his head, dark curls clinging to his forehead with the sweat of our pursuit. “For the first time,” he said, “I have not even a notion of how to proceed. My uncle—our one protection—is gone. I signed his death warrant the instant I sat with him at the festival. They knew from that moment I would show him the Prima-vera. You were right. We should have approached him more covertly.”

  This was no time for triumph. “It was the oysters,” I said, sharing with him at last the growing notion I had had since yestereve. “The golden platter at dinner was meant for all three of us—the family trencher for the head of the table.”

  He nodded with comprehension. “Then we must thank the Lord that neither of us ate them—you because of your dislike and me because of the fast. The saint did save me.”

  Perhaps. But I shivered to think how close he had been to eating the oysters I had saved for breakfast—only Tok’s interruption had saved him from his uncle’s fate. Ironic now that Tok had been sent to kill us by Niccolò who, had he been a dutiful son and attended the feast, would have eaten from the same platter and died too. Madonna, my head hurt with the mathematics of murder.

  Brother Guido spoke again. “If it had not been that way, they would have got him somehow. And now we have been prevented from our audience with Lorenzo, the only man who could pardon us. I know not what to suggest. Nor where to take you. We are drifting, literally and metaphorically. We are a leaf in the current, and we must place ourselves in the hands of God.”

  I had no intention of letting God run this. “We can’t give up!” I said. “There must be somewhere we can go!”

  Brother Guido looked me in the face. His eyes held no fight, his gaze was dull and dead. “No,” he said. “It is ended, but for a miracle.”

  I cast desperately about me for a solution but could see nothing but the strange landscape of dark houses lining the Arno on either side. Then, like the pinpoint of the polestar, a light appeared in one window. Then another. Then all the way up and down both riverbanks, each window, each door, each terrace and balcony, was filled with torches or candles. Every lamp was lit, every rush dip given fire, every tinderbox struck. Could this be to do with us? Could this be the hue and cry that Tok had started to find us? No, surely not, for the whole city was suddenly alight, one glorious constellation. Then, as we watched, the lights flooded the river like stars falling to float on the dark water, as the crowds that lined the riverbank set little paper boats onto the tide, each little vessel carrying a single candle. This fairy flotilla drifted along with Brother Guido and me downstream until we were surrounded by the little flames like fiery lily blossoms. I smiled with delight, despite our situation, and saw Brother Guido smile too. “Is this our miracle?” I asked him.

  “Of a sort,” he said. “ ‘Tis the festival of lights, the Luminara, held each year on the eve of Saint Ranieri’s day. I should have remembered that . . .”

  He stopped, as if choked, and I scrambled to his side, dropping my oar overboard in my anxiety, fearing he was suffering a seizure. Quitter he may be, but he was the only ally I had left in the world. In the golden glow from a million lights, there was enough illumination to see how pale he had suddenly become. “What is it?” When he did not reply I took his shoulders and shook him like a doll. “Brother Guido? What?”

  “The light!” he said, turning eyes on me that were now brighter than any torch in Pisa that night. “Follow the light! My uncle is showing us the way—his last words to me was our escape route.”

  My heart began to pound again. “But where are they going? Where does the light lead?”

  He pointed downriver. “To the ocean,” he said simply, as we followed the numberless floating torches that were leading us to the sea.

  Very soon, before the city’s bells had rung another quarter, we began to see that our destination was not the open water but a place somewhat closer. For a trick of the current made every torchboat gather in a wide tributary, a sort of millrace, that lay like a lake at the foot of a tall, castlelike building. A bend in the river at this very place meant that the torches stopped, the fiery lilies pooling in a lake of fire, which was a beauteous sight to behold.

  I felt three things at this point.

  Cosa Uno: wonder at the sight.

  Cosa Due: relief that we were not to set out to sea in a tiny wooden bark that only had one oar and was already sploshing with bilgewater.

  Cosa Tre: a growing fear that we would be set alight. But soon it became clear that the hundred thousand torches were being doused by someone, or something, for the pinpoints of light were going out as they reached shore, as quickly as they had been lit. As our boat drifted in, we could see that numerous dark figures, each with a bucket, were dousing the candles as they came. I assumed that they were employed by the commune, to lessen the risk of fire on this dry spring night, but something silent and secret in the watchers’ manner made me hold my tongue, and sink down into the bottom of the boat at a single motion of Brother Guido’s hand. We bobbed into the bankside bulrushes and crept from our vessel onto the marshy bank. Brother Guido pulled me low in the bushes.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “That is the Fortezza Vecchia, the old castle. See the crenellated tower high above?”
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br />   I looked carefully through the leaves. “You said the old castle,” I whispered. “What is it now?”

  “The Arsenale.”

  Even I knew what an arsenale was. I had slept with enough shipbuilders in my time. But I also knew that they were, usually, dependent on daylight for their constructions and did not work at night. “What’s going on?”

  Brother Guido shrugged, beckoned. Bent double, we crept from the undergrowth to the foot of the fortress and followed the line of the curtain wall, secret in its massive shadow. As we drew close we could hear sounds of building work—hammering soldering, and sawing—and the shouts of workmen, which by some acoustic trick had been unintelligible on the silent water.

  “The curve of the river, and the thickness of the old castle walls, must conceal the noise from the city,” whispered Brother Guido. He pointed up and we passed through a little doorway. Above us there loomed the derelict tower of the old castle, with half a spiral stair and rooks roosting in the eaves. We climbed as high as we could, away from the deafening cacophony, and at length reached the top of the tower. At our backs Pisa glittered like the firmament of Venus. But before and below us lay a sight belonging to warlike Mars.

  On a man-made lake inside the massive ruined castle was a flotilla of immense ships at various stages of construction. With sturdy prows and crenellated forecastles, they resembled exactly a sight I had seen only yesterday. “The ship on the tower!” I whispered to Brother Guido in a sunburst of revelation, and he nodded hard and repeatedly. He had seen it too—the exact design of these warships had been etched onto the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and sat carved above the door of that great edifice. A clue, a cue, a code writ in stone. I felt it in my ribs as sure as day that this fleet of vessels was somehow connected to the Prima-vera and the cartone I held firmly in my bodice.