Portrait of a Conspiracy

by Donna Russo Morin

  In the sudden stillness of the crowded piazza, the cart of the dead pulled up to the corner of the palace. Men of the Neri, clad in hooded robes of all black, stationed themselves at all sides of the wagon. Viviana shuddered at the sight of the accompanied wagon, though not at the thought of her husband in it.

  Someone jostled Viviana from behind. She spun, finding Jemma returned, dressed now in one of Isabetta’s simple gowns, Isabetta beside her. The women embraced her, one with an arm about her waist, one with an arm about her shoulder.

  Orfeo cried in earnest now. “I beg you, Gonfaloniere. Listen to me. You know me.”

  Gonfaloniere Petrucci sniffed irritably with a shake of his head. “Oh yes, del Marrone, I do know you. I do know the fiendish betrayal you are capable of.”

  Viviana could not help the rise of her brows on her forehead. Given a moment’s thought, she did not find the governor’s proclamation surprising. Any man who would treat his wife and children as Orfeo had was capable of many other despicable acts. His was a morally and ethically corrupt soul. He was a man who would put his desires and his agendas before any others, to the detriment of any, even if it meant betrayal.

  The Gonfaloniere spared a look behind him and two squires brought the painting forward.

  “Do you deny this is your likeness?” The official pointed to the man seated to the right of Francesco de’ Pazzi, one laughing along with the dead assassin, cups raised, clinking together.

  Orfeo squinted, leaning forward. His face was bloodless, eyes and mouth empty maws. There was no denying the resemblance.

  “I…it is…but it cannot…” Orfeo floundered.

  Anyone with a modicum of intelligence could easily contend that someone had put him in the painting on purpose, to indict him falsely. It was quick defense and a likely one, for it was the truth as well as the truth of the prevailing winds that blew harshly through the city. No one was above suspicion. Neighbor gladly tossed neighbor upon the fire of investigation rather than be scorched by it themselves.

  But as Viviana knew so well, Orfeo had much less than a smidgen of intelligence.

  The crowd in the piazza, those close enough, all began to talk of the painting.

  “I had heard of its existence.” Viviana heard a man behind her say. “Word was it had gone missing or was stolen.”

  “Not at all,” another replied. “Apparently da Vinci had it, was doing some restoration work on it. I’ve seen it once more upon the wall. It’s quite the masterpiece.”

  “Is it?” the second grunted.

  Though their faces remained passive, immobile, Isabetta squeezed Viviana’s hand ever tighter and Viviana knew exactly what she felt: pride, unfettered pleasure to hear their work regarded with such admiration. The dichotomy of her emotions, of this moment, made the day ever more surreal.

  Gonfaloniere Petrucci had run out of patience.

  “Orfeo del Marrone,” he yelled, loudly enough for all in the square to hear, “I denounce you as a traitor and I sentence you to torture and immediate death by hanging.”

  Orfeo screamed, as did many in the courtyard, disgust and pleasure melding.

  Lorenzo de’ Medici stepped out of the shadows, stopping a foot in front of Orfeo, skin mottled, splotched with bloody anger. He leaned over Orfeo and spat, a great glob of disgusting green phlegm. “Die,” he growled. “Die as my brother did.”

  Viviana swayed, her head swimming. If not for her companions, she may have fallen. Did she regret what she had done? She shook her head. Perhaps she was only hungry.

  Even as Orfeo kicked and thrashed, members of the Eight bound his hands behind his back, lifted him up, and dumped him harshly into the back of the cart.

  The Eight followed close behind, but it was the fellows of the Compagnia e’ Neri—the Company of the Black Ones—who would escort Orfeo on his final journey upon the earth.

  The men, shrouded in black, had become an all too familiar sight. In other cities they were called La Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce—the Black Company in the Confraternity of St. Mary of the Cross—referred to more simply as the Black or Christ’s Cavalry. It was their mission to keep the offender as calm as possible, to offer comfort as the Eight did their work, work meant not only to punish the criminal, but to frighten the voyeuristic population.

  The cart swung round. Viviana followed behind the Eight. She heard every guttural curse and condemnation made upon Orfeo’s head, from acquaintances and strangers alike, a bloodthirsty crowd lining both sides of the thoroughfare.

  Through the haze of her thoughts, Viviana remembered a similar scene. How well she recalled the day the consigliore had been taken. Like his wife, Viviana followed behind, but Viviana did not cry out, did not plead for her husband’s life. She couldn’t.

  As the procession turned northward onto the Via Calzaiuoli, the Neri chanted:

  Mercy, O highest God and everlasting,

  A man of the Black leaned over the rail of the cart, instructing Orfeo to repeat the prayer. But Orfeo shook his head in denial. The Neri continued without his participation, their droning mixing with the rhythmic thudding of the wooden cartwheels on the hard paving stones.

  Here I am, dear Lord, at the final step

  That every man must take

  In this thieving, base and sighing world

  I deserve the hellish and eternal fires.

  “No,” Orfeo screamed. “No, I do not.”

  He turned, bloodshot eyes searching frantically in the hostile crowd. They lit upon her face and, for an instant, showed a glimmer of hope.

  “Viviana! Viviana you need to—”

  And though the cart yanked him about, swaying as the road curved, it was not the motion arresting his words, but the look on his wife’s face—one of stark, frigid indifference. His scrunched expression fraught with pleading fell away. In her narrowed, hardened eyes, in her curled lip, in her tightly set jaw, she said everything she needed to say, she gave him his ultimate verdict.

  The wagon slowed as it entered the Piazza San Giovanni, the courtyard between the Baptistery and the great domed cathedral.

  “Let me through! Let me pass!” The young woman’s voice had a sharp edge that cut through the crowd. Viviana was not surprised when Mattea popped out.

  “You do not have to be here,” Mattea whispered in Viviana’s ear.

  Viviana pulled back, a hand to the young girl’s soft cheek. “Yes, I do.”

  I repent my criminal ways,

  And with this sobbing face and torment,

  I think about your mortal woes on the Cross.

  As the Neri finished the next portion of the prayer, three members of the Eight climbed onto the back of the cart. Two held Orfeo by the shoulders, firmly in their gauntleted hands, while the other stood before him, brandishing a dagger, its sharp edge glinting in the sun.

  “Look away,” Isabetta insisted of Viviana.

  She did not.

  Viviana watched as they hacked Orfeo’s nose from his face, as the blood spurted, dripping down his ecru nightshirt, spewing across the floorboards. Gasps of horror, degenerate cheers fell away. Orfeo fell forward in a faint.

  The first step in the punishment complete, the cart continued on, turning south on the Via Calimara, past the Mercato, full of morning shoppers, many of whom dropped their packed baskets and joined in the deathly procession. The journey continued, as did the Neri.

  O Lord, snatch me from this weeping.

  So large had the crowd become, so profuse did their cursing rise, the prayers barely rose above the racket. Not once did those marching behind her make to pass. Their sympathetic, almost respectful, attitude toward her was antithetical to the epitaphs shouted at Orfeo. Already she had become the grieving widow; but was it a role they would always allow her to claim?

  The assemblage turned east, following the cart, onto the Via del Corso, the road passing straight by the Pazzi enclave. But it did not pass it by; it stopped before it.

  Once more, men of the Eight climbe
d upon the wagon. Two held Orfeo, while the other lifted his nightshirt and, without preamble, castrated him.

  While those in the near crowd moaned and wailed, Viviana spun from the gruesome sight. For a brief moment, she knew fear, not for Orfeo, but for her own empty heart.

  Frenetic gaze flitting about, snippets of the unreal becoming real, she caught sight of Fiammetta.

  Her oldest friend stood near the corner, in the archway of her courtyard, her dark eyes latched upon Viviana. A flicker of acknowledgment brightened her gaze, but she did nothing. She made not one sign of recognition; she did not step out to join the group.

  Viviana gagged on bitterness. As the procession once more began to move, Viviana offered her friend no more than what she had received—an empty glare. Another irrevocable change came calling.

  The death march continued past the Gate of the Cross, to the gallows and the chapel and cemetery, all under the purview of the Black.

  The adjoining barracks of soldiers emptied out and Viviana’s greatest fear came to light. Her sons stepped out with their fellow militia. She saw the dawning of dumbfounded comprehension cross their beautiful faces, though they held their soldiers’ staid pose.

  “Rudolfo! Marcello!” She screamed their names. “Do nothing, I beg you.”

  More than anything, she feared they would try to undo what she had done, feared they would put their own lives in jeopardy to save their father.

  They moved not an inch, save to turn their faces to the crowd, find hers among it, and offer her their love through the almost imperceptible softening of their gaze. On their faces, she saw what she felt in her heart. The time for righteous justice had come at last.

  The decimated Orfeo was barely conscious. As the Company of the Black led the condemned man up the stairs of the gallows, as they carried him to the rope of destiny, they completed their litany:

  My soul, come to the ends of the earth

  Cries out for your Divine help, so

  That you may put it among the blessed.

  Orfeo’s head already hung limply in the noose set about his neck. With these last words spoken, one man pushed the lever. The floor dropped out from under Orfeo, his body dropped into the hole. His neck snapped with a crack at the end of the rope.

  • • •

  The crowd cheered and, as quickly as it had formed, it dispersed. The sight of an executed man no longer held the novelty it had a few weeks ago. They streamed away, swollen with bored contentment.

  Viviana’s friends and companions held her as they too walked away. She looked up to her sons, mouthing her love for them silently. They returned the sentiments with the barely appreciable dip of their chins their duty allowed.

  She turned back away. Though it was still morning, she was exhausted and, knowing she held still the hearts of her sons, Viviana longed for nothing more than her bed. Only one thought did she have the strength to hold onto, the beast forever stalking me is dead. I live free.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Freedom once born is life’s true gift.”

  She stood deathly still in the soundless courtyard.

  Immediately upon their return to the house on the Via Porto Rosso, Viviana sent Jemma and Nunzio to their rest, though they tried to stay. She shushed them away instead, longing for solitude.

  Yet now surrounded by it, she knew not what to do. But only for a moment.

  Viviana rushed up the stairs, into her sitting room, and pulled out her chest of art supplies and sketches. She dragged it not only out of its hiding place but into the master bedchamber, where she was now master.

  She stood in the room, but found no peace within these walls. Not yet. Her breath heaved. Her nostrils flared. Even now, the memory so fresh with the torture and death of her tormentor, the fear returned just entering the room.

  Viviana stared at the bed. As in most households of similar stature, it was the grandest piece of furniture in the house. The two mattresses, the four bolsters, the richly carved wood frame, the canopy that had enclosed around her, imprisoning her. Running to the bed, she ripped at the canopy and curtain with clawed hands.

  The linens were her next victims. Big and heavy though they were, she yanked them from the mattress, carried them in a bunch to the window, opened it, and tossed them out. Viviana laughed as the street urchins pounced on the expensive fabrics.

  “Take them,” she yelled down. “They are yours. I have no more need of them.”

  Next came his clothes. From out of the guardaroba she took them and carried them into the Great Room. Back and forth she went until a pile as tall as she grew in the middle of the room.

  “Nunzio!” she cried out to the man who was not there. “Take these to whatever orphanage or monastery would have need of them most.”

  Rushing back into her sitting room, she threw herself upon the floor and, breaking fingernails, she pulled up two slats of floorboards. From beneath, she pulled out the collapsed easel. Viviana stumbled but did not fall as she strode into the bedchamber, unfurled the easel, and with a hard, resilient crash, planted it firmly before the south facing window of the room, that which let in the most light.

  Laughing like a child on a Christmas morn, Viviana pulled out her brushes and paints, her palette, quills, and silverpoints. With particular placement, she set them about the room, a room now not only where she slept, but her own private studiolo, one she held dear with the reverence of a chapel.

  She should paint this moment; Viviana knew she had to paint this moment.

  Pulling the full-length looking glass beside her, she found her subject.

  Chapter Thirty

  “We do not always cherish freedom till it is denied.”

  The crash sounded just the same. Did she dream it?

  Viviana jolted up in bed, just as she had almost a week ago. It was the same gray light of a dawn yet realized greeting her. She tipped her head, listening.

  Since the return of the painting, the nights had once more become preternaturally silent, broken only by sudden, hideous cries as another home was assaulted, as another man was dragged from his home, dead or alive. People shivered beneath their covers, praying only that their door was not the next door to crash open.

  Her sons had not yet returned, though their notes following their father’s demise promised they would do so soon. Without a family burial, there was no reason for them to hurry. How glad of it Viviana was.

  Another smash, a crack this time, of the wooden barricade put across the yet unfixed door to her home. Viviana rose slowly from her bed. She did not fear intrusion from miscreants.

  She knew her time had come.

  Viviana dressed quickly in a simple muslin gown, one with a few tiny spatters of paint upon it—all the more appropriate—and awaited them at the top of the stairs, door thrown wide.

  When the man of the Eight, the same who had taken her husband, reached the top, she said not a word. Viviana held out her hands for him to bind.

  • • •

  Without her cries of anguish and protest, few in the neighborhood came out to see, only the one or two who had heard the crashing of the del Marrone door.

  “Return to your beds,” Viviana called to them, almost serenely. “All will be well.”

  It was what she had said to Jemma and Nunzio, prohibiting them from attending her, insisting they need not worry, assuring them her fate would be different. How glad she was for the early morning hour; at another time in the day he might have been there, her ever-present guard, he who brought light into her dreams. She could not have borne what his reaction would have been, what he might have done, and what might have happened to him for it.

  She knew there was not a shred of evidence against her and there she found the ability to endure what she must. Not a woman had been executed, only banished. Without evidence, they would do no more to her.

  They made for the Palazzo della Signoria. What she saw as they approached solidified Viviana’s resolute notions of what lay ahead.


  The large door stood closed. Neither the Gonfaloniere nor Il Magnifico stood waiting to condemn her. Instead, she and her guards reached it as quietly and calmly as if they strolled together on a night of courtship—the soldiers manning the doors opened them with equal composure.

  Viviana could not help herself. She knew she was under arrest, knew too she would be questioned—possibly tortured—but she lost her thoughts to the beauty of her government’s palace and the breathtaking art hanging upon its walls. She strained backwards to look into the Grand Hall and other rooms, but she was denied. Her guard tugged her along with a shake of his head. Viviana knew she perplexed him, but she cared not.

  They spiraled ever higher. She slowed her pace once more, gazing at the Sala dei Gigli, for there, in the Room of the Lilies, was Donatello’s bronze statue of Judith and Holofernes. They passed this room and made for the narrow and dusty stairwell just beyond it, one so slim, her guardsman pushed her ahead, for they could not fit side by side. There was only one place these stairs could take her, to the Alberghettino, the small prison cell within the bulging portion of the tower, a prison cell given its ironic name, the little hotel, when Cosimo the Elder, Lorenzo’s grandfather, was incarcerated within its walls preceding his short exile.

  By the rope binding her hands, her guard tossed her in, cut them loose, and stalked away, closing the door behind him.

  Viviana stood within the vast space, empty save for a cot, a table, and a single chair.

  Rubbing her raw wrists, she sat upon the cot.

  “If it was good enough for the great Cosimo, ’tis certainly fine enough for me.”

  With this righteous declaration, Viviana lay back. Within seconds, she fell back to sleep.

  • • •

  “Rouse yourself, madonna, there is someone here to see you.”

  Viviana jerked awake. The men standing on the threshold were no more than silhouettes. She rubbed her eyes, chasing sleep away. There was the man she had expected to see all along, but he was not alone.