by Lisa Hilton
Behind the palazzo, on the San Marco side, there was an irregular space in the wall, left there when Piero’s great grandfather had pulled down a whole block of buildings to build his new house. Two long stone benches were set at angles, coming to a point where a dusty chestnut tree shaded the corner with its ever-yellowing leaves. The kitchen people were absurdly proud of this tree, ‘our tree’ they called it, and they guarded the privilege of sitting in its patchy shadow jealously. There were, it seemed, hardly any green places in the city, so to be a Medici servant under a Medici tree was a fine thing indeed for them. As the evenings warmed, they made a holiday of it after the day’s work was done.
The customs of Florence about the separation of men and maids were strict; one bench for them and one for us. The first night, I was happy to sit with my bundle of clumsy needlework, happy to sit at all and feel the strain of a day on my feet easing out of my muscles. As usual, none of the other women tried to include me in their gossip, none of them even looked at me. The next night, I went to sit a little further away, towards the corner of the street. The night after that, I walked just a little way out into the wide sweep of the Via Larga, dominated by the forbidding walls of the palazzo. And on the fourth night, I set myself free, alone in the streets of the city. So long as I was back for the first chime of Lauds, when we would be counted back through the gates of the palazzo like so many sheep, I realised that no one would miss me at all.
For the first time, then, I was grateful for my ugly servant’s dress, for it made me invisible. I tied my headcloth more firmly round my forehead to contain the scraps of silver hair which were beginning to grow again, and I moved at a deliberate dawdle, a slave on an errand making the most of her time. At first, my wanderings had no purpose. I had been confined so long to the kitchens that I had almost forgotten the pleasure of moving for its own sake. For that first year, I had been so listless with sorrow I had seen no further than the tips of my clogs. Now, as I walked the city, I began to come alive again.
The first time, I made my way along the Via Larga, a short distance to where the space opened up around the Duomo, the great cathedral, surprising amongst the dull bricks of the narrow streets that wound so tightly a man could span them with his arms. In the evening, the steps of the church filled with people, ‘taking the mountain air,’ they said, for the coolness of the stone. It was nothing like a real mountain, but I could see how one might think it of that huge humped dome, rising as high as the hills on the horizon. From the Duomo, I found my way to the old marketplace, where braziers were lit to fry up messes of tripe and entrails, sharp with rosemary and stuffed between tranches of saltless Florentine bread. I was disgusted by the sight of spurting white flesh, and astonished to find my mouth watering at the smell. I discovered the huge square in front of the Signoria, the government building, though I knew enough even then to know that the palazzo with its high tower was only a façade: the real power lay behind the doors of the Medici palazzo. I walked to the riverbank and watched the bruise-coloured waters of the Arno flow beneath the statues of the Trinity bridge and the crazy, jumbled-together houses of the Ponte Vecchio.
As I walked the city, I began to pay attention to its configuration, to the different moods of its districts, to the chatter and gossip I heard as I paused to take a drink of brackish, ferrous water from a fountain or appreciate the shade of a crowded loggia. Until I left Toledo, I had never thought of the future, except as children do – that vague, unimaginably distant country where I should be a grown-up. Now, passing from a broad piazza to a street of dark little shops, I was searching. Each evening, I tried to go a different way, as far as I could before the ringing of the bells for Compline reminded me of the other servants beneath their sorry tree.
One evening, my walk took me to a church in a poor neighbourhood, the Oltrarno on the southern bank of the river. On every street was a stand covered in tiny wicker cages, each one housing a cricket, each fiddling a love song, bringing to these busy streets the calming throb of a country twilight. The Feast of Crickets was a Florentine tradition, an old festival from the time before the month of May belonged to Mary. It was the sort of thing my papa would have liked, and I was bending over a pile of cages, wishing I had a copper to take one back, when I heard a hissing voice.
‘You, green eyes. Come over here.’
I was startled. My first thought was to run, that it was someone from the palazzo, that I should be whipped. The voice came from a pile of rags in the corner of the church porch. Then I saw a head, bound in a red cloth, and a bony arm beckoning me.
‘Come on, I won’t hurt you.’ The voice was cracked and reedy, an old woman, though the turnip-like face inside the cloth looked sexless, it was so wizened. There didn’t seem much to be frightened of, so I walked over to her.
‘Who’re you then?’
I was so surprised that I went to answer her, but I had been silent so long that all that came from my mouth was a hoarse croak. The creature nodded sympathetically.
‘Dummerer, are you? All the better, for them’s as got the gift. I’m Margherita, hee hee, Suora Margherita to those what pays. Let’s have a look at you, then.’
She had my headcloth off before I saw her hand move, and I felt her bony fingers raking through my hair. I was disgusted, but she seemed so fragile that I was afraid I should hurt her if I pushed her away.
‘Pretty good, pretty good. Won’t have the boys after you, will you? Now, you sit down next to me, here, and have some of this.’
She scrabbled under the rags which covered her body, sending up a foul whiff, and pulled out a white linen napkin, delicately embroidered, which she unwrapped to show a glowing coral of quince paste. Her dirty fingers tore it in half and passed a piece to me. I closed my eyes as I sucked at it, the first sweet thing I had tasted in so long, but she must have seen the surprise before the greed.
‘Don’t go thinking as I stole that! Oh no, my little onion, that was given me, along with all sorts of other things. I’ve got all sorts of treasures under here, hee hee.’
She was obviously mad, and smelly, and coarse-minded, but she spoke to me as though I was there, as though I was something more than a slave’s gown and a pair of working hands.
‘I was watching you. Servant, are you?’
I nodded.
‘Out where you shouldn’t be?’
I nodded again. I sensed that she would be disappointed if I tried to speak.
‘Well, you come along back here tomorrow, if you can. Would you like to earn yourself a few florins? For your wedding box! Hey, you, Nennis!’ She was calling to the man with the cricket cages.
‘You give one of those to my new young lady. Brighten her up a bit. A good noisy one, mind.’
I pulled my headcloth back on, bewildered, as the man obediently selected one of the cages, no bigger than his palm, reached up the church steps and handed it to me. As he did so, the bells began, and I grabbed at it rudely, knowing I should have to run half across the city.
‘Off you go then; mind and come back now,’ called Margherita as I headed off, my clogs in one hand and the frail cage held carefully in the other. As I ran through the emptying streets with the little creature chirping, I realised that I did not have nothing after all. Whatever had caused my father to do as he did, whatever frightened my old neighbours in the Zocodover, whatever the crazy old woman had seen in my face, that thing was a kind of power. And it was mine. I stretched the muscles of my thighs, my bare feet moving smooth and easy over the stones, running as freely as I did in my dream of shadows. For the first time since I left my papa’s house, I felt almost happy.
People fear what they do not understand. The morning after I met Margherita, I woke in the dormitory to find my poor cricket’s cage crushed about him, his hard crust of a body smeared to an ugly green-grey sludge by a heavy clog. I tried to scoop up the mess, for I knew I should be punished for dirtying the floor, and as I was scraping his last, pathetic home into my hands I heard a giggle behind
me. I dropped the wreck of the cage in the brimming slop bucket where it stank in the corner of the room and went down to my work.
That night, and the next nights for weeks, I made my way across the river to Santo Spirito while the other servants stitched and gossiped. Margherita, I learned, was a great deal more than a mad old tramp. She was one of the wise women of Florence, respected and consulted throughout the city, like Suora Domenica, or Donna Ciliego, who lived like Margherita in the church porch of Santa Maria Annunziata. Margherita produced a sort of costume for me from her inexhaustible heap of rags, a silver silk scarf which she arranged loosely about my neck and shoulders to show off my hair, and a necklace of polished coins which she said came from the time when Florence belonged to the Etruscans. When I was dressed, we would sit in the porch, munching companionably on whatever delicacy her visitors had left for her, and wait for the clients to arrive.
‘You’re my green girl,’ she explained the first evening, ‘my little wood-nymph, eh, ciccia?’
I was still puzzled as to what she wanted from me, how she thought I could help her. After we had waited a while, a woman set her hand cautiously on the pilaster of the porch, as though she were trying to knock. Despite the still-sharp heat of the evening, she was wrapped in a heavy brown cloak, but beneath it I could see the hem of an apricot-coloured mantle and the tips of embroidered silk slippers. Not a woman then; a lady. Her face was mostly concealed, but I could make out her anxious dark eyes, sore-looking as though she had recently wept. She looked surprised to see me and went to draw back her hand, but Margherita patted her rag pile invitingly.
‘Don’t worry, my dear. This is my new assistant. All the way from Greenland, where the sun always shines and the ice never melts. See that hair, those eyes? Her mother was from the forests of the north, where the trees stretch for months and her father – hee hee! – her father was a werewolf! Don’t mind, don’t mind, just my little joke. She’s deaf as a post and dumb as a basket, ain’t you, ciccia?’
She nudged me sharply with her elbow. It seemed very stupid, but I could see the lady watching me intently, so I tried to put on a suitably vague expression.
‘But she can see, my little mooncalf, she can see, oh yes. Now, dear, you tell Margherita what the trouble is.’
The lady leaned forward and whispered urgently in Margherita’s ear. Margherita began nodding sympathetically. ‘Oh he has, has he? Oh, the pig! Pigs, all of them. Three months married, you say? And him carrying on already? Oh, you want to know, do you? Well, a wife’s got the right to be sure. Don’t want him bringing home anything nasty, do we? Now, let’s see what we can do.’
She scrabbled in her smelly bedclothes for a while before triumphantly producing a little velvet purse from which she extracted two stones, one green, the other blue.
‘Emerald,’ she announced, ‘all the way from India, and a sapphire from the court of the Shah of Araby! Which is it to be, mooncalf?’
Even I could see that the stones were more pebble than gem, but I felt I knew what Margherita wanted as she proffered her fists to me. I closed my eyes and mumbled some incoherent sounds, which in truth was as much as I could manage. Blind, I tapped Margherita’s left hand.
‘Sinister!’ she crowed. ‘Now dear, you take that home and slip it under his pillow when he sleeps. Any stinking vice that’s in him’ll cloud the stone, see, and then you’ll know for certain. Mind and bring it back now, tomorrow evening sharp.’
The lady scrambled to her feet, stowed the stone in her purse and took out a coin, which she gave to Margherita, making us an awkward bow of thanks before stealing away. Margherita waited until her shadow disappeared in the direction of the Carraia bridge before confiding in me.
‘Oh, you’ll do, ciccia, you’ll do very well. I knew it, first time I saw you. Gives it more of an air, see? A change. There’s an idiot boy over at San Marco prigging half my business.’
She saw my look of confusion as I gestured towards where the lady had gone.
‘Oh dear, I know. Out all night at the bagnio, sure as sure, her man. Well, maybe she can keep him at home before the watch has him. A kindness, dearie, a kindness.’
In all the time I knew Margherita, I was never certain of how much she believed in her ‘kindnesses’. That her clients did, I was sure, for it soon became clear that the Florentines deserved their reputation for superstition, but I never quite decided whether Margherita was a charlatan, a fairground trickster, or something more. Sometimes it seemed as though she did not quite belong to the everyday world, as though her distracted ramblings were not eccentricities but messages from another place. But as soon as I began to believe in her a little, I would see the sharpness in her eyes when she bit on a coin, and change my mind, thinking that after all it was merely harmless cunning.
She was certainly popular, which suggested that her pronouncements and remedies had some effect. People of all kinds came to her. Sometimes it was an anxious mother, too poor for the apothecary, who wanted a remedy for an ailing child, sometimes a portly merchant wanting to know the most auspicious time to set out on a journey, sometimes a labouring man who thought his apprentice was stealing from him. Mostly, though, Margherita dealt in love.
Love, as I saw it then, was to do with lack and money. Love was the pain of mourning, as I mourned my papa and, more dimly and sweetly, my mother. Or, it was money – Adara’s business. Margherita’s clients seemed to see it much the same way. They lacked, they yearned, they wept and they paid. And it was as well that Margherita believed me dumb, for I learned more from those anxious confidences of what happens between men and women than I had ever perceived in my brief period as a tenant in a whorehouse, and the knowledge shocked me beyond words. So many ways for the flesh to ache with desire, so many ways to profit from it. An elderly husband anxious to please his young wife was prescribed cow dung beaten up with fresh eggs and white wine, a servant girl whose sweetheart had taken up with another was advised to steal a lock of his hair, soak it in her menstrual blood and hide the charm beneath his bed for a month. Margherita’s clients believed she could make wayward lovers return, indifferent lovers fond.
She dealt in consequences, too. A betrothed bride anxious that her fiancé should not learn she had gone too far with an earlier beau? Margherita assured her that her virginity would be restored with alum boiled in linen. A harassed mother of ten who could not bear to bring another mouth into the world? A scraping of a mule’s nail melted into the wax of a sacred candle and placed on her body when her husband came to her in the night should ward it off.
None of the remedies Margherita recommended were in the least like the medicines my papa had so carefully prepared after consulting his books. I could not believe that any of them truly worked. But so long as I made my silver necklace jangle and looked wisely into the distance; so long as I made a dumb show of choosing a charm from her hands or tracing the line of a beloved’s fate in an eager palm; she and they were happy. As was I, for each week Margherita would give me a silver florin, which I tied in the corner of my skirt and smuggled silently into a hole I had worked in my pallet at night.
I had begun to have a plan, a real plan. At the end of the summer, I calculated I would have a stock of money enough for a suit of plain clothes and a carter to carry me away from Florence. It was so easy to slip away each evening and one night I should simply not return. I doubted that I was valuable enough in that great and complex household for anyone to care for my loss anyway. I had no thought of where I might go, or how I should live, but the thought of escape was enough to sustain me through long days in the sweltering kitchens. My dowry of books was gone, stolen and sold by Adara, but I could read and write, I knew Spanish and Italian: I should find something, somehow. I dared not count my coins at night, for fear the chinking would alert those three pairs of spiteful blue eyes, but I thought of them, each solid weight another step to freedom. For a time, my dark dreams were suspended by hope.
As midsummer drew near, the evenings grew lo
nger. Amidst flurries of preparation, sweating and swearing from the servants, Donna Alfonsina had finally left Florence with her son and her new baby daughter for the cool of the hills, but the palazzo remained busy. Unusually, Piero de Medici had remained in the city. The courtyard still thronged with Medici familiars, and I often recognised Messr Bibbiena, Piero’s secretary who ordered the household, passing to the great staircase with a stern, urgent expression.
Something had entered the palazzo that summer, something that groped with cold, probing fingers into the upper regions of the house, seeking to clutch Piero in its chilly fist. I listened more intently than usual to the talk in the kitchens and the laundry, but the world of the slaves was so confined, contained within the tiny limits of the offices and those brief moments of leisure beneath the tree that we servants might well have been as mute as I feigned each night with Margherita. I sensed that something had changed. I felt the same rage I had experienced on the Genovese ship that brought me to Italy – I was no more than a mote of dust, swirled about in the robes of the great and shaken off where they would. I never understood the forces that moved me. I wanted to understand what was happening in Florence, but the coins Margherita gave me were too precious for me to dawdle on my nightly walks to Santo Spirito in the hope of overhearing the citizens gossip as they gathered on the benches. I could hardly ask questions, for my dumbness, which I had adopted in fury, was now my most precious disguise. Yet there was something awry in the city, a hint of suspicion and fear that I recognised from my last months in Toledo; and angered as I was by my own insignificance, I was determined that this time I should protect myself.