Somewhere, a distant chime of foreboding sounded in my head.
She led me through numerous passages to the inner sanctum of the palace—a warren of offices and passageways that interlocked with the public rooms of the building. Such was her power and presence that her servants melted away as we approached; rooms emptied when we entered, as everyone ceased their business and gave us privacy for our progress. At length we fetched up at a quartet of darkwood offices I had never seen before. Set within the walls of one such chamber was a lion’s head with a gaping mouth, leading God knew where. It was a terrible thing, and I tasted fear in my mouth—I now faced the beast that I so feared.
“La Bocca del Leone,” announced my mother. “The Lion’s Mouth. Political traitors are denounced here, in writing—the accusation writ down and passed through the mouth to the offices within. Our judicial system relies on such information for the wheels to turn aright.”
My heart plummeted, as I realized that those that filled the prisons below and above us began their journeys here, damned by their friends, rivals, or jealous associates.
I had to clear my throat twice before I could speak. “Is not such a system . . . open to abuse?” I stammered. “I mean . . . is it not used for . . . vengeance?”
She shrugged. “Betimes. But what matter? In each case we exact punishment to fit the crime, in case there is a kernel of truth in the matter.”
I swallowed.
“You will forgive me, my dear Luciana,” she went on, “if we now repeat a little of your former tour—I believe that the best tutors believe in the revision of earlier learned lessons, do they not?” She flashed a green glance at me and I had to drop my eyes—suddenly stone-cold certain she was talking about Signor Cristoforo. “So I will not apologize, but merely assure you that you will not find it dull.”
We went once again through the gloomy paneled chambers to the little door in the wall; I knew now—at the back of my mind I had always known—where we were going. Once again, we descended the darkwood stairs to the prisons—the under-belly of the Venetian state. The chime of terror grew stronger and my skin started to prickle. Once again light turned to dark as we left the airy palace for the dark passages of the pozzi—once again the shrieks of prisoners reached my ears, the pleas of the sane and the babblings of the ones who had run mad. Once again the biting cold turned my skin to plucked chicken, and the killing damp entered my chestspoon. I saw scratches above the doors indicating the numbers of the cells—once names, the prisoners were now numbers, waiting for torture or death, for release would never come.
“Here,” said my mother lightly. She nodded to the burly guard who uncrossed his beefy arms and stood aside.
I looked questioningly at my mother, who nodded. I stepped inside, half expecting the clang of the door behind me. For I was certain, now, that my mother knew something. Instead I was assailed by the smell of shit and vomit, overlaid by a sweet alien smell. My nose recognized the odor before my brain did—I was back in my old house by the Arno, the floor a car-mine pool, my feet wet from the gore, my eyes looking down on Enna, her throat slit and gushing.
Blood.
In the corner a creature of darkness was curled like a babe, keening and crying, his tears dripping in time with the water from the walls. I recoiled from the thing before me and looked at my mother’s dispassionate face. Conversationally, as if she were introducing guests at a gathering, she said the horrible words.
“Of course, you know Signor Bonaccorso Nivola.”
At the sound of his name, like a child or a dog that is sensible of no more than what he is called, the thing in the corner uncurled and turned his face to mine. I could not look upon what I saw there, so dropped my eyes to worse—his hose had been slashed at his groin, and a single bloody appendage dangled there, unnatural, two essential orbs missing in a gruesome mirroring of what had happened to his face. The knife, newly wet from the deed, lay guiltily by on a wooden stool, and my mother picked it up, laid both edges against her tongue in turn and tasted the man’s blood. The stain rouged her unpainted lips and her eyes glittered in the dark like jade. I fled the cell then, and as I vomited I comprehended what I had seen.
His eyes and balls were gone.
As I heaved I was conscious of someone rubbing my back, an action any normal mother would employ with a sickly child.
“Your tutor has gone back to Genoa,” she said. “We did not harm him. But your father and I would like you to stay.”
Again it was said with kindness and affection, as if to a guest who wished to take leave too soon.
The guard, used to such scenes, looked on with dispassion. He pulled a filthy cloth from his belt, dropped it over my leavings, and scuffed the mess back and forth with his foot, leaving a wet smear on the flags. My mother flipped him a ducat, payment for removing the dogaressina’s vomit. And I stumbled back up the stairs, back along the passages, back to my room.
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Bonaccorso Nivola, Bonaccorso Nivola.
I had heard the fear in his voice. I remembered he had said, “Does her mum know?” Not her dad. I remembered how he had paled when he thought the dogaressa stood before him. I realized he knew what I had divined when I first came here—the She-lion was beautiful but deadly. I ached for his family—suffered agonies of guilt about the unknown, unseen Lisabetta. If she had loved her man as I loved mine, what agonies must rack her now? Her man lay in jail as did mine; we shared a fate but hers was a hundred times more dire—she was a widow in truth, with fatherless babes and no money, an empty bed and an empty cupboard and an empty heart and no wealth to ease her days. Dead reckoning—Signor Cristoforo’s phrase came back to me, and suddenly seemed to have enormous significance to the fate of the poor sailor who had agreed to navigate me out of here. I vowed one day to send succor to Bonaccorso’s wife and children, for God only knew if he would ever quit the pozzi. At least Signor Cristoforo had, if my mother spoke truth, been merely banished—allowed to return to his brother and his beloved map shop by the sea, and thence to his wife and the son he had never seen but could bring tears to his eyes at a word. For that I was glad.
But my own cause was hopeless. I knew that I would now not be able to escape; that I would languish here until, by a cruel twist of fortune, I would be taken over the mountains to Pisa where I would be wed to the cousin of the man I loved. To be reminded every day by the similarities of blood that I had bought a counterfeit, a poor copy of the man I wanted. Worse still, Brother Guido was still in the Bargello, a jail at least as bad as the one I had just fled.
In despair I went to the inlaid chest at my window—had she searched my room? No, the gold I had stolen from her room the night before was all there. I took it out and tied it in the kerchief I had meant to give to Bonaccorso Nivola for my passage. I strapped the packet of coins tightly to my upper thigh. If it could not buy me freedom, I could at least send it to his family as I had pledged. There was something else in the bottom of the chest lying forgotten and crumpled. I drew it out. The cartone.
I opened the casement to cast the thing out into the lagoon, for it had destroyed Enna, Bembo, Brother Remigio, Bonnacorso, Brother Guido. And me. But it was the one thing that still connected me to Brother Guido. The one thing left to me that we had both touched. My fingers would not give the parchment up, however hard the west wind snatched at it. In the howl and moan of the warm current, Signor Cristoforo’s words ebbed back to me, as if the spring tide carried them.
The west wind. The west wind heralds the spring. Zephyrus.
I closed the window abruptly. Lit a candle. I unrolled the painting carefully, tenderly, weighted the corners as we always used to do. Looked once more on the picture that my lost love and I had gazed on so oft together. My eyes were drawn to the figure of Chloris—my mother, who had tasted a man’s blood today—looking innocent, frightened, running from the blue-winged wraith at her right shoulder.
Zephyrus.
Her hands reached toward the figure of Flora—towar
d me—for help. I noted the shift Chloris wore was so close to that which my mother wore today. Then I noted again the flowers that issued from her mouth. And the herbalist’s words came to me once again.
Flowers drop like truths from her mouth.
Suddenly I knew that they must mean something and I set my jaw. Very well. If I could not escape, I could at least foil whatever deadly plan my mother was cooking up with Lorenzo de’ Medici. I concentrated hard—checking the flowers that fell from her mouth against the ones that we had identified on Flora’s garb, racking my pained memory to recall all that was said in the herbarium, forcing myself to recall his sweet face, his sweet voice, his long hands writing down the names of the flowers. I looked hard at each bloom. There seemed to be ten in all, although I could see at once that a number of them were duplicates; there was more than one of each type of flower. I counted four different types in all, and after a great deal of thought I believed that I had identified them. The two flowers almost lodged between Chloris’s teeth were occhiocento, or “hundred eyes,” a common flower of the hedgerow. Then I knew the little white flower with the yellow center to be the anemone, by recalling the herbalist’s teachings. Next fell two coral roses, of exactly the type I had held in my skirts, the roses which we had been at such pains to number in vain, for we had never reached any useful conclusions about the number thirty-two. Finally, a twin-headed corn-flower, blue as the twilight lagoon. A fiordaliso. Ten flower heads and four types of flower. Occhiocento, anemone, rose, and fiordaliso. I could not divine further for try as I might I could not recall the Latin for any flower but the rose, even if I ever knew it. So all I had to work with was the number four, the number ten, or the letters R, F, O, and A.
I sighed. I sensed it would be useless to try to construct a word from this quartet—for one thing, the flower names I knew were in Tuscan not Latin, and for another, I could barely read at this point, and barely set down letters in the right order, let alone construct a word from a jumble of letters. Still, there were only four, and I resolved to try. I knew what I was about—I was taking refuge in the puzzle. If my brain were busy doing this, that poor member could not dwell on the real horrors of the day, nor the imagined horrors that could befall another man, in another jail, in another city-state. Well, then.
R for rose
A for anemone
F for fiordaliso
O for occhiocento
The exercise was short. Eventually, painstakingly, I came up with:
RAFO
ROFA
OFAR
ORAF
FARO
FORA
AFRO
ARFO
None of these seemed to me to make a word, at least, not one that I knew. I wished heartily for another flower with another convenient letter. If only I had an L, for instance, I could make FLORA, which would seem suggestive (of what I did not know). But my desires could not add what was not there—I must stick with what I had. Perhaps if I added one letter for each bloom—two F’s as two fiordalisi were shown? And so on. But this didn’t work either—I was left with a crazy collection of letters, none of them useful to me.
Presently I turned from letters to numbers. Perhaps the number four, the number of flower types, or the number ten, the number of blooms, was suggestive—but here I was graveled even sooner. There were four seasons and four winds and four apostles, but I could not think of any tens save commandments and only because I had broken most of those.
I gave up and stared from the window, seeing nothing. From habit I rolled the cartone and placed it in my bodice. It was no good. Like a moth frighted from the candle when he scorches his wing, like a wasp frighted from a ripe peach by the angry diner’s hand, I returned again and again to the place that spelled my doom. I could not help but think of him that I had lost. I recalled another evening in another place, where I had stared once before over another sea. That evening it was the Bay of Naples the day I had come upon Brother Guido lying in his bed, back scourged till it ran with blood for the sin of kissing me. Now, hundreds of leagues into the north, my heart bled out too, and I grew colder and stiller. Perhaps it were best that we should part, that he should die, for I could never have been with him again and not touched him, not kissed him. Better that he should die, and me too.
I stayed in my room all day, refusing all food and drink and company. The sun drowned in the lagoon and the gondoliers and whores competed for evening trade. Exhausted, defeated by the sleeplessness of the night before and the day’s exertions, I fell fully clothed onto my bed, asleep at once.
Only to wake as my mother entered my room. I knew it was she even before I could see her—my back was to the open door, but I knew her from the swish of her skirts and the sounds of her breath. I knew from the thrill of fear in my chestspoon and the thin film of sweat on my upper lip. I fought to keep my own breathing steady, to feign sleep. But opened my eyes a tiny degree and peered through my lashes. She walked into my view, an angel of midnight, her face lit from below by a rush dip candle, her hair a gold halo. She went first to the window and her breath misted the quarrel panes of the glass, for it was a wild night outside with the rain coming down in stripes. It would have been a torrid voyage to Mestre, rain soaked and rough seaed, but I had rather been there than here under the eyes of this woman. She turned and I closed my eyes again, breathed steady to belie my wakefulness. I heard her search the room, quickly and quietly. I heard her open the inlaid chest where the gold and the cartone had lain till this very night, but there was nothing now within. The gold I had stolen was safe in my makeshift money belt under my skirts, and the painting now nestled in its accustomed home in my bodice. I silently thanked the Virgin that I had not changed to my nightshift this eve and that both secrets were upon my person. There was naught for her to find, and realizing this she turned to go. Gliding so smoothly across the rush mats that I wondered if she slept still. Then she stopped and I felt her eyes on me, heard her approach. The bed sagged as she sat beside me and I waited for the cold slice of the knife that had unmanned Bonaccorso Nivola. Still I did not let her see me wake; if she wished me dead I would die now, for all that I lived for was lost to me. I felt a touch, but it was a gentle hand that brushed a golden curl from my eye, tucked it tenderly behind my ear. Then she bent close, kissed me sweetly on the cheek as if I were still the babe that she had bottled and sent away. I felt her breath warm on my cheek, misting my skin as it had misted the glass; I felt the touch of her lips, the lips that hid the tongue that tasted the knife. Then she was gone.
It rained all night, outside my window and on my pillow.
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I woke as if from a nightmare, queasy and hopeful. Sun gilded my window and the horrors of yesterday retreated for an instant, till memory called them to hand. I rose and stretched, my treacherous body hungry and thirsty, wanting succor, wanting to live. Marta came with my breakfast and I ate hungrily, not knowing what else to do. She brought me a magnificent gown, covered in its entirety in peacock feathers, with a mask to match. I stared at the crazy outfit, not comprehending.
“Carnevale” she said briefly.
Madonna. I had forgot.
Mutely I dressed, dumb as a puppet with no strength or will. I would be my mother’s creature, for I could no longer see a way to escape, no longer hope to see Brother Guido again. It mattered not what I did.
At Prime I was summoned to my mother who kissed me on the same cheek as the night before, and eyed me fondly in my finery. She was dressed all in white feathers and had changed her lion’s mask for a swan’s countenance which she donned as we passed outside. My father met us at the foot of the Giants’ staircase, where I had taken leave of Signor Cristoforo, in his corno hat and ceremonial gown. He did not greet me; I would have guessed that he had been told of my planned escape but for the fact that he never greeted me. I wondered how much he knew as he held out his hand to my mother and she placed her hand upon his.
As we progressed with the ducal retinue across Sa
int Mark’s Square the pigeons rose before us in a cloud of smoke. Venice was a menagerie—citizens dressed as parrots and lions cavorted with tigers and monkeys, courtesans covered their faces but exposed their breasts. Vendors sold masks and cups of wine; circus wights danced on stilts or juggled fire. Actors screeched their bawdy lines in grotesque leering masks. The sun shone relentlessly, but the air was freezing. My breath smoked, yet the crown of my head burned. I did not know where we tended—I did not care. I walked behind my mother and she talked constantly to me over her shoulder of the sights we were to see, in such a kind and interesting manner that I wondered if my poor brain had invented the events of yesterday. She was a weathercock, altering with the climate. Yesterday storm and darkness, today burning sun.
Apparently we were to progress through the square, so the people may see us, then embark on the Bucintoro at the San Zaccharia pier, to begin one of the most important rites of the festival—the Marriage of the Sea. My father was to take his barge to the center of the lagoon, and throw a priceless ring into the sea, to bring her favor on the city for the next twelve-month. I almost laughed—the San Zaccharia pier was the place I was to meet Bonaccorso Nivola.
The weather had another notion. Perhaps God, if there was one, was angered at the poor sailor’s fate, for the sky darkened quick as a frown and thunder rolled in from the mountains. Rain beat down from the heavens and the crowd scattered under the colonnades—forks of lightning jabbed silver and blue from the clouds. The courtesans screamed and fled, hiking their skirts to reveal their hairy legs, breasts bobbing as they ran. Feathers and fur flattened, costumes bled their cheap dye onto the paving in a dirty rainbow stream. Everyone sheltered under the loggias around the square, chattering and laughing in fear. I was briefly alone, blinded by rain, a small smile curling my lip—a pox on the Venetians and their Carnevale! I opened my eyes to the heavens, willing the lightning to strike me, hoping my sodden hair was still gold enough to tempt its bolts. As if in answer to my prayer I was blinded once more as the sky split—but the lightning did not strike me; it served to illuminate a sight I had looked at every day but never really seen.
The Botticelli Secret Page 33