by Lisa Hilton
Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Lisa Hilton, 2012
The moral right of Lisa Hilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 467 1
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 709 1
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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To Dominique de Basterrechea, with love
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: FLORENCE – 1492–1496
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART TWO: FORLI – 1496–1499
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PART THREE: ROME – 1500
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
PROLOGUE
Florence, January 1494
THE CITIZENS OF FLORENCE, FAMOUSLY, HAVE LITTLE USE for light. In this city of white and black, grey and dun and bronze, only the snowy mountain hump of the Duomo, Our Lady of the Flowers, surprises with the gaiety of a meadow, its pink and green façade startling as the sudden space which surrounds it, opening as it does from the twined, skinny streets surrounding the Mercato Vecchio, where the grim walled houses hunch towards one another as though to protect their inhabitants from glimpses of the sky, which might distract from the business of getting. Light is for painters, or wastrels; any tremulous sunbeam which steals a cautious finger between the stones is transmuted into gold, battened down and locked away in chests of iron from the Elba mines. Stingy, envious, proud Florence, its miserly flesh throbbing with the hidden gleam of money.
This night, the city is dark as the black ice which paralyses the river Arno from the Ponte Vecchio along the Bardi embankment. Many years since Florence knew such a winter, so vicious that even the ice-rimed statues seem pinched and emaciated, huddling into the wind that thrashes the snow of the Apennines through the streets, turning the patient saints of the churches to shivering goblins. With the winds come the wolves. Keen, running low, they slip like daggers through the white hills of Fiesole. When the farmers force open their doors to the meagre daylight, their lungs smarting after a night of woodsmoke, they find scarlet mosaics in the snow and cross themselves and close the shutters more tightly, for the wolves are moving. Florence may be a citadel of science, but it is also a city of prophets, where temples to near-forgotten gods lie beneath the busy feet of the merchants. On the night of Il Magnifico’s death, a she-wolf howled for hours beneath the city walls. The wolves are moving, and they will bring death with them, from beyond the Alps.
So this night, the streets are empty except for the tiny clatter of dewclaws on the stones of Piazza Santa Maria Novella. Even the beggars who bundle themselves in the wretched shelter of the portico are hidden. Tap, tap. The wolf pauses on the corner of the Via degli Strozzi, turns, a fluid shadow, and begins to trot northward, toward the Baptistery, where the great pool in which all the children of the city are given to God is still as lead. Her tail feathers the great carved doors. The gelid marble of the Duomo picks out amber eyes. Audacious, starving, the wolf crosses straight through the piazza, no shadow now, lengthening her stride until she bounds in black flashes of sinew and need, past the chapel of San Lorenzo and into the Via Larga, her skull aflame with the scents of boiled meat, of peppered lard and spiced pigeon, cured pork and creamed chicken, carried from the kitchens and larders of the Palazzo Medici. Saliva hisses on the snow as she noses frantically along the street doors, but this is Florence, and they are iron bolted.
The wolf feels the suck of her empty belly beneath her ribs, lets out a miserable whine, shoves and gnaws, but the doors hold fast. Her black pelt ripples with clutches of want. In the wall beside the doors is a small window, an ingress for messages or alms. The wolf rears her body upwards, stretching her length until her paws rest on the sill. The wooden shutters are loose, their hinges weakened with the contractions of the long winter. The wolf drops to the tamped snow, circles back, gathers the force of the wind in her shoulders, leaps. Her snout strikes the wood, the shutters make a flat thud on the soft drift inside, she scrabbles for purchase, hindlegs and tail beating the air, hauls her bruised weight through the aperture, lands noiselessly, buried. She is inside.
The cortile is full of eyes. In Florence, they say that spirits can be imprisoned in statues. In the centre of the courtyard, where the cleared snow shows prints already molten with the new fall, stands a boy; improbably naked save for gaiters, boots and a teasingly pointed cap, his left hand easy on the plump adolescent curve of his hip, his right resting on the hilt of his lowered sword. The wolf checks, he is no threat. A little aside is another figure, not a smooth bronze, but a towering, lumpen creature of snow, planed crystal wings soaring from his back, torso strained about the great serpent which writhes at his feet, jaws agape to strike at him. Already, the lines of the statue are drooping, aged by freeze and thaw. The wolf pays him no mind. The still air hums with scents, but she does not make her way through the loggia to the service quarters on the ground floor, but, head down, confused by her waning need, she follows another trail, which speaks to her blood. Tap, tap. Her claws scratch the fine wood of the staircase, mounting and turning, she moves supple as the lathe, one flight, two. Eager now, along a passage, the glands in her jaw working, wetting the air with her panting, her snout finds a door, pushes slowly until she insinuates herself, drawn by wraiths of desire, into the room.
The room contains a chest, a simple wooden chair, a low truckle bed. Roughly plastered walls, no fire or stove, just a squat iron brazier, its few coals barely disturbing the currents of her breath. On the bed is a child, a little girl. Or not so little, maybe, a spiky starveling thing. She wears a tattered red dress, once luminous silk dulled and shabby, battered knees and soft, narrow little arms protruding. Her spine is held erect, leaving a space between her fragile body and the damp wall. Pale hair, colourless as new straw, obscures her face, which is bent forward over a doll, a stump of a thing, lovemangled, caressed to a grubby chunk of body and a precarious flannel head. The child knows the wolf is there. The wolf hears the stirring of the translucent hairs on her body, the quickening in her lungs, the deepened grasp of her fingers in the puffy cloth. The muscles above the wolf’s hindquart
ers contract, readying her to spring, ears flattening she releases a low growl from the base of her throat.
And the child looks up. Her copper skin catches the flame of the wolf’s eyes, drawing them to her face. Eyes green as the depths of the glaciers high in the Apennine peaks, green and unfaltering as the ice that even the August sun cannot move. The wolf cannot find the fear cooling on her skin. Her eyes fix the wolf’s eyes, she makes the slightest shake of her head. The wolf shudders along the length of her black body, stilled as quickly as if she had a huntsman’s arrow in her heart. She whines faintly. Every nerve in her, drained by days of running, ribs beamed with hunger, wills her to take, to plunge and kill, but she cannot. Head raised, throat exposed, obeisant, she dips her forelegs and shuffles across the boards towards the child. For a moment, gold light melds with green. Then, silently, she turns and trots for the door.
The child waits, her knees drawn up under her chin, wrapped in her thin arms. She sends her ears out from the palazzo, out into the streets of Florence, over the river and up into the hills, until she finds the wolf’s heart – and travels with it across the snow at killing speed, bounds longer than her own body, until it slows, slows.
She hears it then, the first quavering howl, and draws back to herself as it is answered, first one, then another and another, the wolves keening for her until the city is encircled with the baying, riding to her over the darkness, and the child draws her quilt about her, and smiles, and sleeps.
PART ONE
FLORENCE
1492–1496
CHAPTER ONE
ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE, THEY TOOK MY name. When I came to the palazzo they washed me in a brass tub in the kitchen, as though I was a fine lady’s pet monkey to be picked over for fleas. I would not speak to them, so they turned out my red dress to look for any signs of me. My mother had sewn it for me, cut down from her own wedding gown. It was the finest tabby silk, pomegranate-coloured, so when it turned in the light it was sometimes the rich crimson pink of a sunset, sometimes as bright and crisp as the skin of an orange. The silk came from Kashmir, my papa told me, a mountain place like our city of Toledo, only the mountains were so high only God could see their peaks. My mother stitched her love into every delicately worked gather on the bodice and sleeves. Inside, where my heart would be, she placed a pentagram, and inside that she stitched my name. Mura. From the old language, when the caliphs were kings in Toledo. Mura: wish, desire.
They saw my mother’s mark, but they could not read it, for it was aljamiado, their letters in our first tongue. I can speak Spanish and Arabic and even a little Latin, but I had no words in theirs yet, and I should not have used them if I had. All my words were kept for curses. Mura, my mother stitched, for I was her wish. But I was no longer Mura Benito, the bookseller’s child from Toledo. I was esclava. Slave. They took away my doll and my red dress and gave me a coarse grey robe, stuffed my feet into heavy wooden clogs. They clipped my hair close to my head and took it away in a kerchief, to sell for a vanity. My brow bound in a black striped linen cloth, I kept my eyes to the ground and became invisible, just another moving cog in the machine of the palazzo. I had learned by then that my face brought trouble. I became Mora, Moor, because I am Spanish and they knew no better, even though my skin is not plum-black but the colour of new gold.
The world shrank until it was contained within the walls of the kitchen. I marked the passing of days with the church bells that sounded dimly from the city beyond the thick stone, and with the journeys of thin wands of light that probed through the high windows. I shuffled about, silent except for my newly clumsy feet, performing the simple tasks they set for me. I stripped beans, separating the pink streaked pods from the creamy husks, I washed salt from the muslin sacks of capers unloaded from wagons which brought supplies from the countryside, I picked stalks from spinach. For hours and hours I stood at the stone troughs and scrubbed plate, rubbing it over first with sand, then rinsing in grey, greasy water, until my hands puffed out like fresh white rolls, and then, as the weather grew colder, cracked and reddened like an old woman’s. Twice a day I sat at a trestle in the stench of the household’s sweat, knowing I stank as they did, and tried to eat their coarse Florence food. Bland and greasy, everything smelling of pig; hard, dull-tasting bread, murky pea soup, disgusting withered shrivels of pork rind. If I allowed myself to think of the hammam, of black soap and orange flower water and the wonderful feeling of being clean inside as well as out, I knew I should go mad, so I kept my eyes down and did my work and tried to make myself as dull as a pebble.
Gradually, the sounds around me resolved into sense. First objects – cloth, bowl, spoon – then slowly I was able to understand more and more of the speech around me. As I worked, I repeated the words to myself, though I would not speak them aloud.
Mora the slave did not speak.
I learned that the palazzo belonged to Piero de Medici, the son of Lorenzo who was called the great, Il Magnifico. There were wonders in the house beyond the kitchen, they said, though I had seen the courtyard and did not think it so very fine. All the business of Florence passed in the palazzo, for Piero was a great man, one of the greatest in the whole of Italy, richer than any prince, for all that his blood was not noble, but tainted with the ink of the counting house. The palazzo was never still. From the moment the street gate opened at Prime until the porters closed it at Lauds there came streams of people, to petition, to plead, to bargain, taking their seats on the wooden benches set into the walls of the courtyard, trying to mind their dignity as Piero kept them waiting for weeks. Clerks scuttled self-importantly back and forth with their account books and abacuses, processions of factors and lawyers, notaries, priests and ambassadors, artists and gentlemen and even bishops passed through to hover expectantly at the foot of the great staircase which the likes of me were not permitted to climb.
Sometimes, ladies came to pay visits to Donna Alfonsina, Piero’s wife, who had recently given him a baby son. The kitchen people said that Donna Alfonsina was a proud lady, a Roman princess who thought herself too good for Florence. I did not think that so wonderful, for everything was grey in Florence and the sun never seemed to shine; but the house slaves were affronted – they counted themselves Medici too, part of the family, and so took up their dignity at Donna Alfonsina’s disdain. As if she would pay them any more mind than she might a fly, black and buzzing about beneath her as they were. I saw the ladies sometimes, as I crossed to the loggia lugging a basket of fresh linens for the noon dinner. Their bright silks and fresh skins were like sudden rainbows in a cave, so that it hurt me to look at them.
The kitchen folk thought me dumb. At first they tried to rile me, with overset basins, cuffs and slaps I did not deserve. My arms blued with sly cruel pinchings, then when I did not cry out they fell to coaxing, wheedling me into speech. But so long as I was careful never to raise my eyes to them, they would, in time, cease to notice me. That was all I wished. To be Mora the slave and stay safe until I could become myself again.
And that way, a year went by. A year with no flowers or books, no walks in the meadows beyond the walls with the sun setting like pink velvet over the mountains, a year with no scent except the faint lavender rustle of a lady’s train and my own sour unwashed body, a year in the finest house in the finest city in Italy and nothing but heaps of greens to look at to soothe the keening in my soul.
At night, lying on my straw pallet in the unsteady peace of the chamber of sleeping women, I mourned. I mourned and I dreamed. I crushed my arms across my chest to dull my breaking heart and I walked the banks of that crystal river beneath Toledo, by buildings of marble as pale and delicate as the first frost on the boughs of the almond trees, and I searched for my mother and my papa.
I wore my red dress that day, the day the world changed. That was all I had of my mother, the thread of her own heart’s desire against mine. She named me because she rejoiced that she would have a little girl of her own – wish, desire. She knew she would die of
me, my mama. That is why she placed the sign above my heart to keep me safe, since she would never hold me close to her own. But she was with me, my papa told me, she was always with me. If I was ever lonely, or afraid, my mother would come to me in my dreams to keep me safe.
For all the while I was a girl, in Toledo, I pictured my mother like one of the Holy Virgins I saw painted on the wall when we went to Mass, distant and serene, the gold of her hair melding with the gold cloth of her mantle, a pool of sunlight where I could dip my hand whenever I needed. I was not lonely. I had my papa, and he was all the world to me.
My father, Samuel Benito, was a bookseller. Books were his livelihood, and it was books which brought him to his death. We lived in the Zocodover, the ancient market quarter of Toledo, and buyers came to our crooked little house from all over Europe. My father explained to me that in the time of the caliphs, the convivencia, the libraries of the Moors had been preserved with all their learning and it was this which made Toledo so important for scholars, a place of tolerance and translation, where moriscos like us could meet Jews and Christians as equals, united in respect for the ancient learning of the lands of the East.
My father was not a doctor, but that learning taught him how to cure sickness. Often, after consulting his books, he would take me with him to the slopes above town to gather plants that he stewed and ground to make medicines for the people who would tap at the door after dark. Sometimes they paid him, if they were rich, but many did not. Not that his kindness served him anything, in the end. That last spring, we would go up to the meadows as we had always done, where the new grass was a pale gold-green and the hills were carpeted with crocuses, opening their flimsy violet petals to the ripening sun. He named them for me, set them softly in my hands so that I should know their touch and smell, told me of their qualities and how they might be used.
‘We’ll never starve, little Mura,’ he would tell me, ‘for people are always sick, and they are always afraid.’