Wolves in Winter

by Lisa Hilton

  ‘So the King of Naples is planning to march to Milan to protect her honour and make good her rights,’ said Cecco. ‘And Il Moro has asked Piero to join with him against Naples.’

  If Piero was not loved, nor did he have the money to buy fear. The vast Medici vaults, to which all the kings of Europe had once been in debt, lay empty and cobwebbed.

  ‘What have the French got to do with it?’

  ‘Just as well for you that one of us has ears on his head. The French have a claim to Naples. They can make an alliance with Milan, give the dukedom to Il Moro, and put their own king on the throne. They say he’s a hunchback, the French king.’

  Thresholds are special places. Between inside and outside, public and private; the border between safety and danger, between different selves. Everywhere in the palazzo, the doorways and lintels, ledges and stair-treads were carved and decorated with stories for those who traced them over the stone. I had seen already how the house was divided, how the kitchen folk were invisible to the family who lived above. Only the faintest of traces showed where their treadings had crossed, just as deer and boar make tracks through a forest and never quite meet. I had known the kitchens. The streets were a second world, where I walked with Cecco, gobbling saffron cakes and raisins, a world of sober clad merchants who moved with the pulse of money through the stony gunnels of the city’s veins. We saw scrawling in the alleyways – ‘People and Liberty’.

  As the streets grew clogged with snow, there was hunger in Florence. More and more penitents turned out to hear the preaching of Savonarola. Florence was a city built on sin, he claimed. The Medici had tried to wash their usurers’ wealth in beauty, transferring their wicked gold to the statues and paintings which made the city famous – but was it not a sin, Savonarola asked, that the rich should walk in scarlet, drunk on the imagined perfections of their hired artists, whilst the poor starved beneath the walls of their treasure houses? The sword of God, he railed, would descend from over the Alps, slicing off the diseased limbs of Italy like a surgeon’s blade.

  Piero’s, of course, was the greatest treasure house of all. The palazzo was another world, bright yet untouchable, where I glimpsed Piero in his court of power, and the scrittoio was the last, a hortus conclusus, a walled garden, Maestro Ficino called it, shut off from politics and money and the business of living, where all that mattered were the spirits of the books. A garden, he said, but I thought it more like a bird’s nest, a bundle of stealings, with my master pecking at his manuscripts like a greedy magpie. He paid no mind to the news from Milan, or the stories of the French, or the fresh talk of the streets, nor yet to the passage of the envoys on the staircase beyond his door. He would forget to eat, Cecco said, if his plate was not pushed in front of him.

  While the other worlds of the city moved through their thresholds for wealth or places, or simple hunger, Maestro Ficino governed each moment of his day by the stars. He wanted to cast my chart, and grumped when I told him I could not remember my birthday. He had been born, he said, with Aquarius nearly square to Mars in Scorpio. ‘Saturn set the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning,’ he explained. Those born in the first month of the year were inclined to an excess of black bile, to be removed by warm spices and bleeding (though for himself he found that wine cured it better). This was his little joke, he gave it every day at dinnertime, and I was always sure to smile, for I saw that he was a kind man in his way, so gentle and refined.

  He questioned me over and over about my father’s books, for his plan, he said, was to gather together the greatest collection in the world of the writings of the philosopher Plato, and translate them into Latin to continue in the glorious tradition of Piero’s father. Plato was the last of the line that had come through Trismegistus to Orpheus to Pythagoras to Philolaus, names that I had absorbed even through my sleep as my father and his friends talked around the fire. I did not see that Maestro Ficino cared too much for the glories of Piero, nor much for the good and true properties of things – for healing, like my father; rather, he cared for what was beyond them.

  The only power that interested my master lay between the stars and the things of the world – properties, he called them – which bound the celestial and the terrestrial. He was an accomplished musician, believing that the soft stirrings of his harp might echo the movements of the planets: Jupiter was ‘earnest and sweet’, Venus ‘wanton and soft’. All this he showed me on his charts, to teach me. He had me mix scent for him, heating rose oil and dried jasmine flowers, to burn in a pure alabaster perfume-cup, and brew white sugar and cinnamon, as being the pure foods that would help him lift his mind to the spirits. While Cecco copied and sighed, and blotted his freckles with ink, I measured and stirred and listened, so far as I could follow him.

  Like my father, he believed that there was nothing sinful in knowledge, that witchcraft was a coarse word, and that seeking the divine alignments of the elements was the most proper pursuit for scholars. I hope I was an apt pupil, difficult as I often found it to follow his thoughts. It was agreeable to be there, soft work; and when he set to reading or making his notes on the letters that came daily from all over the world, I set to my own learning. I repeated the names of plants and herbs, tracing their pictures in his diagrams of bright-coloured ink, learning how they should be treated to bring out their kindness. We sat thus for hours, each day, but still I was always glad when he waved his hand to dismiss me and I could set out with Cecco under the gateway of the palazzo to that other world beyond.

  Gingilassi. It was a Florentine word, a word I liked. It meant to waste time, hang about doing nothing, and that was my favourite thing to do, to wander about with Cecco when we were released from the scrittoio.

  ‘You wait,’ he was saying one evening, ‘Ser Piero will see for those Frenchies. They’ll never care to come against a Medici.’

  Piero was hesitating against the offers from Milan, for Florence was presently allied with Naples. The whole peninsula, Cecco said, was waiting to see which way the Pope would turn. Cecco puffed out his chest the way he always did when he said the Medici name.

  ‘You’re always creeping up to him.’

  He elbowed me cheerfully in my skinny ribs.

  ‘Ow! You are too!’

  We were walking quickly, to keep off the cold, we had come a long way up the city, near to the church of San Marco.

  ‘I’m proud of it. Palle forever!’ he said.

  ‘What are you saying then?’

  We turned to see who had spoken. There were a group of them, standing about in a doorway. Boys a little older than Cecco, scrawny and tough-looking. Hungry-looking.

  ‘I said, palle,’ Cecco repeated, ‘and proud of it. What’s it to you then?’

  I patted his shoulder. ‘Cecco, it’s late, I think we should go home.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way they eyed us, the fineness of our Medici clothes. Their jerkins were tatty and they had no boots. We were a long way from the Medici gonfalone, in this part of town.

  ‘Come away.’

  I tried to hurry him, but as we passed before them a stone caught Cecco’s back. Another and another.

  ‘Freedom, that’s what we’re for. We’re no Medici arse lickers.’

  Cecco tried to keep walking, but one of them came up behind him and hooked his foot about his leg so he fell. I went to help him, my hood slipped off my hair.

  ‘It’s her. The witch! Ficino’s witch!’

  They were around us now, pushing us tight together. I began to be afraid.

  ‘We’ve heard about you. There’s witchcraft going on in the palazzo.’

  I looked about frantically, hoping that one of the Oresta, the magistrates who kept order in the streets at night, might be passing, but there was no one. They made the sign of the malocchio, the evil eye, pointing their fingers at us. I thought quickly, there was no way we could fight them. I put my head up and gave them my eyes straight.

  ‘I’ll tell
my master of you,’ I said. ‘And do you know what will happen?’

  They were silent, just boys after all.

  ‘If I say so, he’ll fetch out a fresh corpse from the graveyard at Fiesole. And it will walk down through the streets at night, and it will find you.’ Quick as a cat, I shot out my hand and grabbed the hair of the nearest one, twisting a clump of it away in my hand so he screamed. ‘It will follow the thread to you, like this,’ – I drew out a hair between my fingers – ‘and you’ll wake in the night and its rotting breath will be in your face and then it will sink its teeth into you, for they are hungry, the dead. And you can scream and yell all you like,’ – I kicked out contemptuously at the boy who hunched over beside me – ‘but no one will hear you, for the dead are silent. And they’ll find you in the morning, all ready for the grave. Shall I tell my master, then?’

  They were moving away from us now. It was almost too easy.

  ‘Yes,’ shouted Cecco, ‘that’s how they do things in Toledo.’

  ‘Shut up, you’ll spoil it.’

  I stared them down until they reached the corner, then I stretched out my fingers and hissed at them, and they scattered like pigeons. Cecco was staring at me, astonished, even a little fearful.

  ‘Is it true, Mora? That was really good.’

  ‘Scemo. Of course not. I had them, though, didn’t I?’

  We ran home, laughing all the way, our good boots loud on the cobbles.

  *

  That winter, the wolves came to Florence. They ran low through the shuttered gunnels, hunted, starving. At first, they took the lonely ones, the poor creatures who hunched in rags in doorways and ditches, then they grew bold and slid into houses, nosing their prey through cellars and stairwells, so that the last sight a wakened sleeper saw was the glow of their amber eyes in the darkness. I dreamed them, I dreamed them all. I dreamed the she-wolf who howled at old Lorenzo’s dying. She came to my chamber but I was not afraid, for she knew me as one of her own. Wish, desire. She was my wolf-mother. I dreamed I heard the thump of their hungering blood, and smiled; for I had the light of the forests in me, and the black man watched over me. They sang me to sleep, my sweet shadows, and I placed no light in my window, as poor fearful snivellers did. I dreamed them and I knew I should not be harmed.

  *

  So the ambassadors went back and forth, and Piero prevaricated, and in Milan Lodovico Il Moro declared for France. In exchange for the confirmation of his ducal coronet, he would send his soldiers down the spine of Italy and take Naples for Charles, the crook-backed king of the French. And Piero commissioned a snow statue in the cortile from a young man named Buonarotti. A whimsical conceit of a thing, as though to show that the Medici had no need of marble to make their greatness known. To squander a winter’s worth of bread on a caprice was his response to the sword that Savonarola dangled over Florence. It was the prior of Santo Spirito, they said, who had taught the young sculptor his anatomy. Nor did they miss the defiance of the gesture – that Piero would take the Dominicans’ artist and put him to work on a trifle.

  But Buonarotti surprised him. Perhaps Piero thought that his protégé was malleable, that he would produce something curious and flattering and pretty. For a whole day the slaves shovelled snow in the courtyard, compacting it into a huge block with their spades, and the boy, who could not have been more than twenty, had them build a series of shelves around it, with torches in the brackets so that he could work by night. We slept that evening to the faint scrape of his chisel and in the morning it was there. St Michael the Archangel, Michelangelo, stooping to cut the throat of the writhing serpent grasped in the clutch of his arm, the straining power of his torso an affront to Piero’s airy dismissal of the spirit abroad in the city.

  This is might, it seemed to say, this the lock which fate will hold you in, and you can try to wriggle free, but you will never escape.

  Maestro Ficino shuffled down in his tatty robe to gawp with the rest of the household, not even minding his bare feet, clucking and muttering at what his master would think. But Piero could not allow himself to betray any emotion but pleasure as his servants drew back to let him see the marvel, and the young man beside it, his face flushed with cold and triumph after his long night’s work. It stood there then, this wondrous thing, a reproach to Piero’s attempted insouciance, until the thaw reduced it to a dripping, shapeless lump; but by then Piero had other matters to contend with than the conceit of a cheeky sculptor.

  The Florentines believed that spirits could be imprisoned in statues, that their makers could cast ill wishing into the stone, and though the statue was gone by spring it seemed that after all, Savonarola’s predictions would come out. He had cast himself as the avenging angel of Florence, and the Medici power was trickling away in the meltwater of the Alps.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT THE END OF HOLY WEEK, THERE WAS TO BE A BALL at the palazzo. First came the ceremony of the carriage, which Cecco rushed me to Mass to see. All the fires in the city had been extinguished since Good Friday, and now the flame in the Baptistery would be relit with the spark of the stone chips from the Holy Sepulchre itself, brought to Florence by the first man to scale the walls of Jerusalem. The crowd was so thick that Cecco hoisted me on his shoulders so that I should not miss the spectacle as a curious mechanical dove was placed in an iron war chariot, of the ancient Florentine design. This year, defiantly, Piero had ordered that the chariot be filled with gunpowder. The square was quite silent as the orange spark hissed along the fuse, everyone waiting to see if the spark would take, which would promise a good harvest after this cruellest of winters. For a moment there was a crackle as the flame caught, and then I was thrown to the ground as Cecco lost his footing and stumbled, shoved backwards by the surge of the crowd away from the deafening blast. I scrabbled at a cloak to tug myself to my feet, in time to put back my head and see the grey spring sky come alive with a volcano of colour, my ears ringing with the delighted roars of the crowd. Cecco was grinning, a smudge of bluish powder on his cheek.

  ‘Did you see, Mora, did you see it? Isn’t it wonderful!’

  I smiled back, more pleased by his pleasure than my own.

  ‘And see, I’ll dance with you later, too. We’ll dance in the spring, eh?’

  As we walked up the Via Larga, Cecco took my hand. We had to push our way through the gate; it was so busy with carts delivering provisions, a troupe of splendidly raggedy tumblers, and three sheep being driven complainingly to their doom. I remembered Margherita’s tumblers, wondering where their travels had taken them, if they had struggled through another lean season. I was lucky, I thought then. After all I had endured, I had come safe to this place, to this city of marvels, I would see a ball, and warm in my own was the palm of my friend.

  Attentive to the complaints in the city, Piero had declared that the spring ball would be an open affair. Any Florentine who could muster a decent costume should be admitted. Disgusted, Donna Alfonsina departed for the country with her children and women, as soon as she had heard the Easter Mass – which was, perhaps, Piero’s true intention. I had never been taught to dance, I should make a fool of myself if I tried, but all the same, as I washed my face in rosemary water in my attic room, with the sounds of the palazzo preparing itself beneath, I couldn’t help but feel thrilled, like any girl, like a real girl. My red dress, I admitted ruefully, was much too short and shabby, but I had another cut-down gown, in dark blue, and with my hair hidden under a white linen cloth I thought I might look, if not well, at least not shaming.

  I went down early, by the servants’ way, for though Piero was keen to show himself a man of the people, the great staircase was of course reserved for the grandest guests. The cortile had been tented over in yellow silk, which made a wonderful light as the torches picked up its warmth under the dimming night sky, and tables ran along each side, displaying the subtleties over which the convents and confectioners of Florence had laboured for weeks. Here was the church of San Lorenzo, the Medici church
, reproduced in gold-figured marchpane and here a green sugar-meadow filled with tiny meringue statues. Here a tower of caramelised virtue, holding fast against a company of tiny knights, their costumes as bright and intricate as those who rode the walls of Piero’s chamber. And here a mountain range, in the coal sugar eaten at Epiphany, with a column of scarlet soldiers winding up it only to fall into a ravine where a group of plum-cake lions already held the first of their victims in cochineal jaws. The French. This was Piero’s solution then: gaiety and beauty and splendour should drive them out. As I looked, the familiar cold tingle of my dreams stole across me.

  *

  Night. I stand wrapped in a cloak, waiting by the window of a huge room. The darkness smudges the plasterwork mouldings, so that this space, which has been all made of playful light, seems menacing, more like an ancient fortress than this perfect palazzo, so high and delicate that its pale stones might have been wrought for a fairy city. At the table, upon which a single candle flickers in its tall silver holder, sits the man in black. As ever, his face is masked, but I can make out the power in the breadth of his shoulders beneath his velvet cloak. His wrist is delicate, elegant in a black leather gauntlet as he moves his hand to summon forward the two men who wait at the end of the hall. When they speak, I know by their voices that they are Florentines; I can hear the golden Italian of Tuscany in their voices. The man’s voice is low, its quietness containing great anger, or perhaps a simulation of anger.

  ‘I am not pleased with your government. How can I trust you, how can I be sure you will not attack me? You must change your government and pledge to support me – for I have no intention of letting this state of affairs continue.’

  The older of the two Florentines answers him. ‘Florence has the government it deserves, and no other power throughout Italy keeps better faith with its people.’

  The other adds that Florence has the protection of the King of France. The king has ruled that no incursions be made into their territory, they await six thousand men.