Portrait of a Conspiracy

by Donna Russo Morin

  For hours, Viviana rocked upon her knees. It was then that his face materialized in her mind.

  “Keep him safe. Oh please, keep him safe.”

  She cried then…not for her sons, or the society, or the man whose face lingered always in her mind. She cried for the Medici, for the Pazzi so filled with hate, for all fiorentini whose lives would never again be the same. She cried for herself, the illness to body and mind from the last few hours finally bringing her low. Still, she could not bring herself to forego the habits and duty of so many years.

  “And watch over Orfeo, for he is far too stupid to do so himself.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Truth can be so much harsher than lies.”

  The pounding on the door below jolted her awake, brought her up from the floor where she had crumbled.

  “Madonna?” Jemma stood in the threshold, eyes bulging.

  Viviana stood with a wince and a moan.

  “I will see to it, Jemma.” She relieved the girl as the thudding continued. “Stay here. Lock yourself in if you wish.”

  Jemma said nothing but stepped aside to allow her mistress exit.

  Viviana rushed down the stairs, fearing not the reaper, but his crier.

  The banging stopped only when she threw off the small wooden barricade and wrenched the door open. She blinked at the hallucination upon her stoop.

  “Andreano?” Viviana squinted into the growing light of a coming dawn.

  “Have you seen my mother, Mona Marrone? Tell me that you have?”

  With his wavy hair of wood brown, a beautiful mane now dampened with dirt, falling in his face, the young man with the amber eyes resembled nothing of the dashing nobleman he was. He reached out a hand and grabbed her arm.

  “Have you seen my mother?”

  “I have not. We were supposed to meet in the cathedral—”

  “She has not been seen since yesterday morn. She never returned home.”

  “Oh, Andreano.” She reached out a hand, taking his. A thought struck her. She clenched tighter; now she would wrench truth from him. “My sons, Andreano, do you know of my sons?”

  “Yes, signora, they are well.” Andreano nodded vigorously. “They were part of the force calming the city yesterday, but they are garrisoned today, unhurt and resting, I assure you.”

  Viviana threw her arms about the young man’s broad shoulders, crushing him to her in soundless gratitude, her silent tears wetting the dark navy of his doublet.

  “But all else is in riot.”

  Viviana put a hand to her chest. “Il…Il Magnifico?”

  “Lives. He lives, madonna.”

  “Oh, thank the—”

  “But he is crazed with vengeance. He is killing everyone involved, anyone he thinks is involved, the Pazzis, Salviatis…more.”

  Andreano told her a tale she would not soon forget, of bodies hurled from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, of the Archbishop and Francesco de’ Pazzi. She could bear no more.

  “Stop, please Andreano, stop.” She held him with a squeeze of her hand. “Let us try to think of where your mother could be.”

  “I have no time.” Andreano kissed the hand, turning away. “I must find her.”

  A step out the door, he spun back. “You will ask the…her other friends?”

  Viviana nodded without pause. She always thought Lapaccia had told her son of their group; the older woman had always been far braver than she. She knew what he asked, knew the danger of it, but it mattered not at all. The women must meet, must help, as soon as possible.

  “I swear it to you,” Viviana promised. “As fast as we can.”

  With the assurance, a nod of his head, a blink of moist eyes, he was gone.

  • • •

  They ran through deserted back streets with hands clasped like links in a chain, Viviana hidden in her cloak, Jemma cowering in hers. They scurried through the twisting pathways to the south, to the mouth of the Ponte Vecchio, to the very edge of the quarter of Santa Maria Novella.

  By the time they reached the statuette, both were out of breath, rushing to put the sign out fast in hopes the women of the art sorority, or the few servants with knowledge of it, would have time to see it and return to the safety of home.

  Viviana leaned against the shelf of the corner niche, hands upon the waist-high stone lip. Filling her lungs with much needed air, she peered up to the devout face of Saint Caterina. Though it was not the Caterina that had launched the women on their clandestine undertaking, they had made this shrine theirs, one of hundreds scattered throughout the city, using it to inform members of meeting days and times. Such reliquaries punctuated many an intersection and were oft-tended with fresh flowers and candles.

  With shaking hands, Viviana removed the dead flowers from the vase at the saint’s feet, replacing them with eight fresh, brilliantly white lilies, pilfered on their way past a resplendent palazzo garden. Around the saint’s feet she arranged eight small stones from the pile always kept at the base of the niche, all on the eastern side, where the morning light would shine upon them.

  Stepping back, she studied her work as she would study one of her paintings, looking for flaws in the laying of the sign, one disguised to be, to the unaffiliated, nothing more than an oblation. Satisfied but not quite, she turned to Jemma, who gave her mistress another of her efficient nods. It was all Viviana needed. She grabbed the girl’s hand, and again they ran.

  Chapter Eight

  “The saving of the one, outweighs the safety of all.”

  Viviana climbed out of the rented carriage without help of a footman, a treacherous act in her voluminous gown. Keeping her veiled head dipped downward, she dropped the coins into the driver’s hands and watched as he rerouted the vehicle and clattered away.

  Once out of sight, Viviana scampered along on the toes of her worn, beribboned slippers, around the far corner and up the hill along the Via de’ Marsili. She slipped through two narrow and deserted streets; every door she passed had been closed tightly—shutters too. It was as if the city itself had died two days ago. If not in mourning, many hid in fear, frightened of the vengeful fist of Il Magnifico pounding anyone remotely culpable.

  She clambered uphill in the lofty and wealthy Oltrarno quarter, and quickly made her way to the base of the great church. Services marking Terce were soon to begin, though with hardly a congregant to be found.

  As she made her way to the middle door, the largest of the three, Viviana crossed into the strangely shaped shadow of Brunelleschi’s architecture, the curved Byzantine silhouette. She spared a quick glance up to the single round window many feet above, and the small modest cross atop the barely pointed steeple. Its creamy plaster façade, accented in dark gray pietra serena stonework, spoke of simplicity and serenity.

  Inside, however, its truth lay revealed. Almost forty side chapels bespoke its depth, each with its own altarpiece. The long, wide center aisle, lined with columns topped by scrolled capitals, led the eye, and the penitent, to the altar and the simple baldacchino, under which the priest offered Mass.

  Viviana rarely ventured into this part of Santo Spirito, but on this day, more than in many, she felt the need to light a candle; she would light them all if she could. She had come to find her spirit in the classical faiths, rather than those of Catholicism, much like Lorenzo de’ Medici. But there was a shadow of it on her soul.

  Viviana stepped through the small back door in the corner of the north transept, then lightly through the petite square garden, past the lush green sprouts poking up and out of the dark earth. The postern swung loose in the tooth-like gate.

  As always, she found the outside door of the baptistery open. Ignoring the first inner door just inside the darkly paneled interior—a locked room, the true guardroom for the church’s sacred reliquaries—she turned left, grabbed a lit lantern from a sideboard with one hand, lifted her skirts with the other, and made her way along a dark corridor. It narrowed as she went, slippers shuffling on dusty stone, p
owdery sand lifting to dance in the pale rays of light. The lantern held aloft revealed the small simple door ahead, a portal to another world.

  Here was the moment she relished like the anticipation of a lover’s lips. She drew the chain out from between her breasts and grasped the key in her hand. Leaning down, she entered the elaborately scrolled piece of metal in its port and sighed with contentment when she heard the click of release.

  Only seven keys to this room existed; each woman of the fellowship wore theirs about their neck, strung upon a finely wrought chain. They wore these keys day and night, sometimes hidden beneath their clothes and nightshifts, sometimes as a part of a jangle of jewels adorning resplendent gowns. They wore them as the knight wears his armor, as the warrior wields his sword, for it was both their protection and their weapon.

  The seventh key belonged to the man who gave them their home; the parish priest of Santo Spirito, Father Raffaello, brother to Natasia, one of the younger members. As much a devotee of art as the group itself, he was truly a man of God’s graciousness, for he cared not a whit by whose hand art was created. Creation itself was by the hand of God, mortal beings were merely the conduit.

  Social order deemed there were only two places women were to be, at home or at church. A church, then, was the perfect place for this secret art society to call home and no great cajolery had been required for them to gain access to Santo Spirito’s secret chamber. For not only was Father Raffaello Natasia’s brother, he was a doting one at that.

  To be a male artist was to find a banquet of support and sponsorships—the sculptors were members of the Guild of Masons, while the painters belonged to a branch of the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries. Such affiliation came after years of apprenticeship, some starting as small children as young as nine years old.

  For women, there was nowhere to start, nowhere to go. Viviana hoped this assemblage, secret though it may be, would be the beginning of the end of such exclusion. It was a ridiculously lofty notion, but she had no other way to think. She was a woman passionate about her craft, and all the more tortured for it.

  Viviana’s presence was the first to break the sacred stillness of the room. For a moment she did nothing more than stare at the chamber and its contents in wonder.

  The six roughly hewn workbenches of dark wood lined the room with precision, three to a side, facing each other and the open area in the middle. The easels stood tall and proud beside them, some boasting finished works, others in progress, and some with blank, stretched canvasses, their vacant paleness begging for attention. She picked up brush and palette from her own bench, one a bit cluttered, a bit splotched—signs of her zeal, not untidiness. Though not ready to work, she needed the feel of her tools in her hands.

  Her loving gaze circled about the room. Each workbench told its owner’s story: the hammer and chisel upon Isabetta’s—her dearest friend—told of her inner darkness; the exquisite, fine line sketches spoke of the loving Mattea’s attention to detail; upon Lapaccia’s bench were her tools, far more perfectly organized than any others; Fiammetta’s held the most expensive of tools, of course; and Natasia’s was nearly empty, the young girl had been too obsessed of late with the coming of her nuptials.

  The latter three she knew not well, did not speak with them over much, and yet they were an intrinsic part of her world. What they were doing together was as vital as who she was as a solitary being, secret though their connection may be.

  They need not share all, as long as they shared this. The thought flashed as she gripped the handle of her brush a pulse tighter, as she looked down and saw the myriad of colors on her palette…there they were, the women of the art league.

  Along the base of the three stonewalls, wet canvasses stood in a row, propped away to dry. On the walls themselves, frescoes hid beneath other frescoes. Boxes and chests jutted out like boulders on a cliff side. So much storage was required in an artist’s studiolo. The aromas of spices and tinctures used to create the paints enveloped all with pungency and bite.

  The rising sun found its way in through the southern wall of windows, diffused by thin tracing paper tacked over the thick glass. It afforded the artists light for most of the day. How proud they had been when they first created this place, the hours spent in merry camaraderie, in deep study, and in experimental work with Caterina’s books and journals and sketches before them.

  Viviana came full circle, stopping again before her work, analyzing it with a harsh eye. She knew what it said of her, or what the lack of popular subjects revealed. There were no religious symbols, nor those of love, nothing except barren wastelands, landscapes bereft of people, abounding with roads and paths leading off and away. At least she created them with the new technique, with the lifelike dimensionality Giotto and Masaccio had brought to the craft, open windows on a fully rounded world, not the flat depictions of previous eras.

  “What was once the most vital has become the very essence of the trivial.” Fiammetta’s booming voice broke Viviana’s reverie as the stout contessa lumbered in.

  “The world has changed for us all,” Viviana lamented. “Are you rec—”

  The question remained unasked and unanswered.

  “Oh, you are here!” The trill announced Natasia’s arrival…and her relief. “After yesterday, I did not dare to hope we would ever meet again. I thought it was the end of the world and we would never see each other, save for in the hereafter.”

  “It may still be.” Fiammetta took the young woman in her hefty arms, the strands of their necklaces clinking together with delicate notes.

  “Such a sight to behold, one I thought I may never see again.” Isabetta had crept up on them in her stealthy way.

  Viviana embraced her, arms quivering. “I was so very worried about you.”

  The tall woman scoffed. “I reside with the poor folk. This mayhem belongs to those hungry for power and glory.” A hint of her northern accent remained, and all of her bluntness, as stark as her pale hair.

  They were harsh words, not fully uninformed; none dared deny them. Viviana would say nothing of Lapaccia until the last member arrived, though she would make their number only five. Viviana had no expectations to see the sixth arrive, though her heart thudded with hope.

  “Your husband, Isabetta, how is—”

  “The same.” The woman rushed past the topic as she always did when any tried to ask after her husband and his health. Her pale eyes met theirs without a blink.

  The silence in the wake of her rebuttal grew and grew heavy; each woman took the opportunity to make for their workstation, though there were few thoughts of actual work. Isabetta brushed unseen stone chips from her crude wood table, the dust clinging to her pale tresses. Fiammetta fiddled with her brushes as she always did upon arrival—cleaning them meticulously, arranging them by size. Natasia stood before the finished works at the base of the wall by her table, pointing a finger at each one—an introduction heartily made on every arrival.

  Light, quick footfalls pattered along the corridor, metal grated upon metal as key merged with keyhole and twisted.

  With Mattea’s arrival, they came together again. It was as if the very air about them had somehow changed; haphazard streaks forming a painting with the last and final stroke applied. It happened whenever they were together. They gathered themselves together in grateful silence, forming a circle of joined arms, hearts beating with the same rhythm of relief. For a moment, they wallowed in it. It gave the group—and the women in it—their power.

  Viviana knew the moment had come; the stalling grew unbearable.

  “I called us together to—”

  “Stop.” Isabetta held her. “Will you not wait for Lapaccia?”

  Viviana’s stomach flopped, her body quivered on a deep, indrawn breath.

  “She…she won’t be coming.” Viviana leaned against a table, hands clasped tightly; a dispassionate telling was the prescription for this tale. “She won’t be coming, for she is missing.”

  A collect
ive gasp arose, one bursting with outrage and horror.

  “Tell us, Viviana,” Fiammetta ordered. “Tell us all…now.”

  Viviana squared her shoulders, and did.

  “Dear Lapaccia.” Natasia sank into a chair, covering her face with her hands as Isabetta held her shaking shoulders.

  “Poor Andreano,” Mattea whispered, tears of her own unshed, staring out into nothing.

  “The Pazzi have broken us.” The words escaped. Viviana bit her full bottom lip; she knew they were the wrong ones to say the moment they were out of her mouth.

  The reaction, when it came, as quick as it came, was no surprise.

  Thrusting her hands on her wide hips, Fiammetta turned on her, face puckered sourly.

  “The Medici asked too much, took too much.” The woman’s ire splotched her bulbous cheeks, as always when she and Viviana talked of the two most powerful families of the land and their divergent loyalties. They tried, with every effort, to simply not discuss it. There were cracks in the bonds of every family. But avoidance may not be possible anymore. “If they had only—”

  “If they had—” Viviana’s face contorted in shock. She pointed a sharp finger. “You were in the cathedral, Fiammetta. You saw what the Pazzi did.”

  “They may have felt they had good reason to—”

  “There is never a good reason for such carnage, for cold-blooded murder!” Viviana shouted. Fiammetta’s face turned a vivid purple to match her brocade gown.

  “Please, my friends, please,” Mattea stepped between them. “We must not talk of this now. We must talk of Lapaccia.”