Wolves in Winter

by Lisa Hilton

  *

  ‘Well?’

  I rootled in the pile of rags beneath me, my hands encountering strange shapes and repellent softnesses, until my fingers closed around something, something I must have known they would find. I brought the object out and the three of them craned to see it. A wooden ball, smudgily painted over in gold. Perhaps it had fallen from the carving of a litter. It sat in my palm, rolling slightly, and as it turned we all of us saw a crack, a break in the wood where it was coming apart. The man reached for it and as he took it up it divided, one half falling to the marble floor with a dull little thud. It was hollow. I didn’t wait to see their reaction, I knew that I had to get away.

  I jumped to my feet, scrabbling at the headdress and the foolish necklace, ducking my head into the shadows, shaking off Margherita’s grasping hand. I didn’t care if the man would give me a coin, he’d had his answer. I didn’t understand what I had seen, but I knew enough to be afraid. I ignored the calls of Margherita and the boy, did not stop moving until I was safely back under the tree, my head covered, my eyes down. It would be my last night in the palazzo, I decided. There was savagery coming to Florence, as it had come to Toledo, but I was no longer a child, I would outrun it. Seven florins would have to be enough.

  My days always began with a jolt of pain. The moments before I woke were the cruellest, those few half-conscious minutes of peace when I believed myself still in my bed in our old home, and that I would breathe the smell of raisins and new bread and the tobacco musk of my papa’s sleep. Then the swift recognition, the deep ache that brought tears to my unopened eyes. That next morning, though, I could feel my mouth curve into a smile. No more dreams. I had seen the man in black, I had understood that I must leave.

  It all seemed so clear, like a story in one of my old picture books. I lingered a little, enjoying the first sun reddening the inside of my eyelids, telling the story over. My father had known that my strange looks would play on the superstition of those who accused him of heresy. When Adara failed to protect me, my mother came to me, as he said she would, and sent me the strength to escape the palazzo. The man in black would bring me the sign. It seemed so simple.

  I was disturbed by a tiny clatter, an unmistakeable clink. Too late, I glimpsed the back of a grey skirt disappearing in the doorway and I knew before I had reached my hand into the hollow in the straw beneath me that I should find it empty. I flew down the stairs, hunching my robe over my head, stumbling down to the courtyard, where the three of them were waiting, sneers prepared on their faces, their yellowed teeth bared in the falsest of smiles. For a moment, I simply stood and stared at them, unable to believe that they had stolen all my money – all my hope – from me. Then one of them, the tallest, held out her hand and laughed, rubbing her thumb against her first two fingers in the sign of money. All the shock and pain eased out of me then. I felt suppleness in my limbs, an energy that stretched through my sinews to my fingertips, and in seconds I was on her. I had never fought before. I had seen drunken men brawling late at night after carnival in Toledo, and a year in the kitchens had witnessed several scrappy catfights amongst the girls. But this was different, no clumsy male blows or flapping, feminine scratching and hair pulling. I was going to kill her. I was going to tear out her throat with my teeth if I had to. I caught her a blow on the underside of her jaw with my fist that took her down and another that knocked her head back against the tiles. The weight of my hurled body shocked the breath out of her and I rammed my elbow into her face, splitting her snub nose like a melon. I could hear shouts around me, but I was conscious only of the smoky scent of the blood that spread over her face, dripping down her neck and staining the stones beneath us. I had a fistful of her hair in my hand and was bringing up her head to crash it down on the stones when another blow sent me sideways, clear off her whimpering form, landing me on the side of my face so my ears rang and burned. I closed my eyes, for a few moments full of a strange, wounded pleasure, and when I tried to open them my right eye smarted and couldn’t see. The other eye stung with blood – mine? As I peered about, I saw a collection of clogs – the servants out to jeer us on, I thought – and then a pair of boots. Polished leather boots. As the thudding of my heart quietened, I was aware of the terrible hush around me, as though the air was still with shock.

  ‘What in the devil’s name is this? How dare you?’

  I knew before I raised my head. I knew that voice, and I knew the owner of those boots. For a moment I wanted to lay my head against the warm flags and laugh. I believed I had never seen Piero de Medici, but the young man last night in Santo Spirito had not been the masked creature of my dreams. The pain in my head was stronger now, dizzying me. My headcloth was lost, I was exposed, I lifted my eyes.

  ‘You.’

  I didn’t care what happened to me. I did not fear being whipped and turned out to beg, but I knew it would be worse than that. I crawled to my feet and attempted a tottering curtsey. Without the mask his face was handsome, brown hair falling to a finely worked linen collar. I watched him. First would come confusion, and then fear, and then I would be finished. I knew his secret, I knew he was afraid enough to come sidling to a crazed soothsayer, and I knew he could crush me like a cricket beneath those fine Spanish boots. I waited, wearily, for the order. Perhaps he would have me taken as a witch, to burn as they burned heretics in Toledo. I didn’t care. A voice broke our dumb tableau.

  ‘Messr Piero, Messr Piero, sir?’

  The boy I had seen at the church, the clerk who had shown Piero where to find the wise woman. He was panting, as though he had been running hard.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Messr Piero, but Maestro Ficino says it’s her. The bookseller’s child.’

  The brown curls on Piero’s neck shifted as he wheeled his head in surprise, but that was all I heard, because then the dizziness came again and the stones of the courtyard rose once more to meet me.

  *

  I awoke in a forest. Slender, elegant dogs picked their way through an undergrowth figured with bright flowers, leaves curling around their paws. Then I saw that what I had taken for trees were lances, stretching upwards, carried by vividly dressed men on plump horses, except they must have been riding underground, for there was no sign of sky. I raised my arm and saw it was draped in the red silk of my mother’s dress, and then I knew that I had died and I was waiting by the riverbank under the streets of Toledo, for my parents to come and find me, so that we would walk together amongst the flowers.

  ‘She’s awake, sir.’

  The boy. I was not dead then, but as I raised my head, I saw that I had come into another world.

  ‘Drink this.’

  Wine, warm and sweet with cinnamon, as Adara used to give me to make me sleep. I was lying on a great high bed, soft with a patterned silk that seemed to wander like a meadow from what I now saw were paintings on the walls. The air smelled of beeswax and lavender. The cornices on the door, so far away, were a medley of enamelled woods, all colours from black to the palest pearl. I was in the palazzo, the palazzo I had heard of, but never seen.

  ‘Can you hear us? Can you sit?’

  I pushed myself up on my elbows, feeling the silk of my dress tight under the arms. I must have grown, working down there in the kitchens. There were three of them, grouped about the bed, Piero, the boy and an old man, a dried up creature who gazed at me avidly as though I was a precious thing he wanted to steal. He spoke in Castilian, and I wondered for a moment whether I was in Florence after all.

  ‘You came with the books. The Toledo books?’ I could hear that he was forcing his voice to be kind, and that it came strange to him. Always the books; the books that took my papa from me, the books Adara sold me for. The old man was scrabbling in the sleeve of his robe, a worn robe, I noticed, more like a servant’s than someone who would be allowed into Piero’s chamber, for I supposed that was where I must be. He produced a folded paper and held it out to me. It was a picture, a picture of myself. I stood framed in the window of
our house, my dress and my hands inked vivid red, my hair waving wildly above a crown of roses. At the top of the drawing were some words. I traced my finger along the letters.

  Angel.

  ‘You can read?’

  I nodded, still dumb. Piero and the boy were watching us both now, this odd exchange, both of them leaning forward on the counterpane like gawpers at a fair.

  ‘This, this vision? You saw this. Your father did this?’

  I opened my mouth. Inside my head I heard my papa’s voice, telling me to be brave, just as he had done all that time ago. At first, no sound came. I swallowed hard, feeling their impatience. I knew that if I could not find the words then it would be the kitchen and the beans forever. At best.

  ‘Yes, sir. My father. Samuel Benito.’

  *

  I wore my red dress on the day the world changed. They came for the book, and they took my father. The cold air was on me, the smell of Adara’s body as she held me close, the steady rhythm of her footsteps, carrying me here, carrying me to Florence.

  *

  The old man’s voice brought me back to myself.

  ‘You saw this?’

  I was confused. How could he know what had happened that night, why had that picture been made? Why that word, ‘angel’? Then I understood. The old man did not know what he was seeing. He thought my father was a conjuror. He thought he was seeing magic – so I answered carefully.

  ‘I did, sir.’ Which was no more than the truth, after a fashion.

  The old man turned to Piero. ‘I told you, I knew it!’ He was gleeful. ‘It is she, the child I told you of.’

  I had given him something, something he wanted to believe. I was glad then that I had never cared to learn the names of the kitchen folk, for as I lay back amongst the clean silk cushions of Piero’s own bed, I knew that I should not be returning there.

  *

  So my world changed once again, supple as a shining fish tossed in one of the cook’s pans. The old man’s name was Maestro Ficino. At first, I had no idea of the importance, indeed the eminence, of my new friend, this short hump-backed creature, whose thin frame, long soft hands and tatty robe made him a very caricature of the absentminded scholar. All I knew was that I possessed something he wanted. Later, ruefully, I realised that my father would have gladly given all his books to spend a single day in Maestro Ficino’s company.

  As with Margherita, I was uncertain of what it was I had that he clearly yearned for; but I had learned from her, and from Adara before that, how desire was the only currency worth bargaining with . . . and just like Margherita, however vague my notions of what I could offer, I could feel his hunger for it. Perhaps then I became a true Florentine, for desire is worthless unless it can be transmuted into value.

  I was moved to a room of my own at the top of the palazzo, and along with my red dress, which I clung to even though the hem almost showed my knees, I was given my old doll. And a wooden truckle bed and a chair, and a box like the one I had at Adara’s house, though I had no treasures to put in it and thought it would be wisest to keep the theft of my lost seven florins to myself. A maid, her mouth screwed into a prune of disapproval at my sudden elevation, carried up a box of cut-down clothes, and I chose a blue cloak of soft wool to cover my shabby frock, though it was far too hot to need it. I was no longer to eat with the slaves and house servants, but would take my meals in the sala, the huge room behind the courtyard where Piero dined every day with twenty or thirty of the most important men in Florence. I was seated far away, of course, at the end of the table in a huddle of goggling clerks and pages, but still I could share the delicate dishes, artichokes and eel and thin slices of liver cooked in sweet wine, with white manchet bread to soak up the sauces. I wore the cloak to cover my battered face, though no more had been said about the fight, and it seemed as though my enemies, along with all the other familiar faces from the kitchen, had quietly disappeared, so great was the distance between the people who occupied this same space. Although I had so recently been one of them, they were so dingily unrecognisable to me now, when I came across them, that as time passed I almost let myself believe I had never been one of their number.

  In the daytime, Maestro Ficino occupied the study on the half-landing of the great staircase. There was another scrittoio in the house, behind the antecamera where Piero slept and conducted his private business, but this room was more like a treasure house with cabinets filled with tiny drawers to display jewels and gems, books bound in gold, and a huge cameo bowl. A room for display rather than for studying – which, after a few days of observing Piero at closer quarters, I decided summed him up quite well. Maestro Ficino’s room was different. It reminded me of my father’s house, with piles of books mingled with mortars and alembics, jars and bottles, and ceramic pots of cinnamon, white sugar, attar of roses, giving to the whole, as soon as the thick door was opened, a mysterious, inviting smell of vellum and spices.

  That first morning, I saw that the young clerk, already grubby with ink, had been set to copying a book I recognised. Maestro Ficino ignored him, but it was all I could do not to snatch the worn green-tooled cover from his hands. My father’s books were here, in the palazzo. They had been here all the time. For a moment I saw him holding it close to his face in the candlelight and I almost groaned with pain. I concentrated on chivvying the last of the almonds I had secreted from the breakfast table from the pocket of my cloak, scraping the fine membrane from the nut and crushing its sweetness between my teeth to taste my home again.

  ‘Have you seen this book, Mora?’

  Maestro Ficino, was holding it out to me, eagerly, as he had done the day before. I was bewildered.

  ‘The Corpus? The Corpus of Hermes Trismegistus? This is my own translation, Pimander.’

  Suddenly my confidence in my new position fell dizzily away. This was a test, and if I failed it, the kitchen and the salt caper berries beckoned forevermore. I was at a loss, I looked around the room as though the dusty piles of words would show me an answer. Then I caught a glimpse of the boy, seated in the window bay. His cap had slipped off revealing a bright tuft of coppery hair and his freckled face was focusing urgently on me as he nodded his head.

  ‘Yes, sir. I have seen it. In my father’s house.’

  ‘Your father was a follower of Aristotle?’

  I began to agree, but the frantic bobbing of the curls allowed me to shake my head in time.

  ‘Oh no, sir. Not a bit.’

  And so it went on. He questioned me for an hour, and each time the boy in the window provided my answer. He spoke of Solomon, and the seven divine arts, of a monk called Michael Scot who had studied in Toledo hundreds of years ago, of divine beings and heavenly configurations, while I shook and nodded like a marionette, grateful that my hood concealed the frantic gesturing of my eyes. As I answered, Messr Ficino scribbled on a linen tablet, dabbling at his thin lips with his thin fingers, murmuring ‘good, good, excellent’ until my head ached with the tinny reek of rose oil and dust and the skin under my arms prickled with anxiety. Eventually, when I agreed that indeed, my father concurred in the belief that celestial bodies were capable of imparting their powers to terrestrial matter, he reached for a volume and began to leaf through it, concentrating so absolutely that for a long while the only sound in my room was my own breathing and the scratch of my saviour’s pen. When he looked up, he seemed surprised to see me there and waved his hand absently, his eyes wandering back to the page.

  ‘You may go now. We shall speak again tomorrow.’

  I wandered outside the palazzo, since there was no one to stop me now. The despised tree seemed rather inviting. I sat down and bunched my knees under my chin. Although I had grown taller, I was still as ribby as a street cat. I thought of walking over the river to find Margherita and astonishing her with my newly discovered powers of speech, and that made me remember my poor little store of florins and my thwarted plan of escape. It seemed pathetic. Anyway, perhaps I wouldn’t be permitted to wa
lk about by myself, no Florentine lady could be seen in the streets without a chaperone. But I wasn’t a lady; I didn’t know what I was. Another treasure for the Medici collection, like Maestro Ficino? Or was I to return to the world of cellars and pantries, leaving the palazzo once a week for Mass and a glimpse of the dull Florentine sky? I could run, I supposed, even yet; but I had nowhere to go and nothing to go to except a heap of rags and a crazy woman in a doorway. I was bewildered, disconsolate. I had understood so little of what happened in Toledo, and since then I had kept myself alive by deliberately not thinking. I was ugly and scarecrow-headed and there was no one to care for me. Hunched in my cloak, I made myself small and silent once more, and in a while began to weep.

  ‘Well, here you are.’ It was the boy again, his face washed, looking even younger without the inky shadows.

  ‘Cecco. Cecco Corsellini.’

  ‘Mura. I am Mura Benito. Thank you for helping me.’

  ‘You don’t know anything, do you? How old are you?’

  I thought. I had been ten when I left Adara’s house, and I had not minded the days since then. ‘Eleven, I think. Maybe twelve by now.’

  He looked at me appraisingly, at my bony ankles sticking from my too short gown.

  ‘No one would know you were a girl, anyway.’ He seemed to find this satisfactory. ‘Come on then.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  He made a deep bow from the waist, like a real gentleman, and held out his hand. ‘ To the finest seller of baked apples in all Italy, of course.’

  As we passed along the walls of the palazzo, Cecco pointed out the symbols set in stone around the portico, a diamond relief with a pattern of feathers and lumpy little globes.

  ‘They’re the palle,’ he said proudly. ‘Palle. Balls. The symbol of the Medici. From when they started the bank. The palle are like the little weights they used on the scales to balance the money.’ He lifted his head and proclaimed, ‘Chi non se volta a esse colle palle gli fie rotto la testa e le spalle. In other words, if you don’t support the palle, you’ll get your head broke. We’re Medici, see?’