Wolves in Winter

by Lisa Hilton

  ‘I have a letter here, from the prior of San Marco himself. It came to me at Forli. I have ridden through the night.’ I could see, his handsome young face was drawn and there were yellow hollows beneath his eyes.

  ‘I have no fear of the Dominican, sir. I have come against him before. He knows that my studies are the Lord’s work, just as his prayers are.’

  ‘He tells me I have been harbouring a sorcerer. That you are . . . conjuring devils and Christ’s own mother knows what. The Signoria will not stand for it! We are Medici, remember, they want no continuing of Lorenzo’s ungodly ways.’

  ‘Was it not Savonarola himself who waited at great Lorenzo’s deathbed in this very house?’

  He breathes, slowly, resignedly, waiting for the end. With each breath, the wolves run across the mountains. They stream through the passes, fluid as wine, I taste their hunger. Each breath surges them onwards. Faltering, the man raises his hands to the priest who stands grim beside him. His hands draw the sign of the cross above his breast, the she-wolf raises her snout and howls.

  ‘He writes that you have a familiar. A Spanish witch. That she spirited you out of the palazzo. Well?’

  I looked helplessly at my master, who hemmed and mumbled and scrutinised his sleeve.

  ‘Spanish?’ he turned to me. ‘Spanish? Ficino, I demand you tell me what abominations you are practising here or so help me I will have you in the Bargello by nightfall and none of your sainted scholarship will save you from the fire.’

  There was nothing for it but the truth, or a version of the truth, at least. I was sorry for my poor master, he was as much a slave as I at that moment. He had nothing but what his reputation and Medici charity had given him, and Giovanni could turn him out to beg his bread on the roads if he wished it.

  ‘There is no harm in it, sir. She was a servant in Ser Piero’s house, I saw she was intelligent and taught her. My apprentice was . . . lost, when the palazzo was attacked. I brought her here, we came with some travelling people and I thought it better she change her gown, for safety you understand, the French were on the roads. That is all.’

  ‘So you are the girl?’ He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, and it struck me again how invisible we were to great people, how we only existed if we made trouble. Piero had lost plenty by that blind arrogance.

  ‘Yes, sir. They called me Mora, at the palazzo.’

  ‘Mora the apothecary. And where did you learn to heal? These are Spanish arts you have practised upon me and my household?’

  ‘No, sir. I know what my master has taught me, from his books.’

  ‘She is special, sir,’ interrupted Ficino eagerly, and I burned with shame, willing him not to boast of our labours.

  ‘You are too kind, master,’ I put in hurriedly, glaring at him. ‘All my poor knowledge has been gleaned from your wisdom.’

  Giovanni paced up and down, the spurs snapping at the floor. ‘I am sorry, Maestro. But I must ask you to give up your pupil. I have a use for her, and her skills.’

  ‘You cannot, you do not understand. We are coming close!’ I was astonished, I had never thought my master cared enough for me to shout.

  ‘If the Signoria thinks that I am harbouring a sorcerer, the Dominicans will have you burned. And I shall lose my contract with Florence and we shall all be ruined. Do you understand me? You are most welcome to stay here and continue at your studies, but I can have no talk of witchcraft at Careggi. You must give her up.’

  I was so sorry for my master in that moment. Whatever I had thought of his work, I had been honoured to be in the presence of such learning, and he had sheltered me. It was what my father had hoped, that a scholar who could read his key might protect me. What would Ser Giovanni do, if he knew what I truly was? He would turn me over to Savonarola and they would duck me in the Arno.

  ‘She is nothing, sir, a slave. Why should you trouble yourself about her?’

  I would forgive him. I would forgive him though his words went through my skin and squeezed around my heart. He had said no more than the truth.

  ‘I wish to present her to the Countess. She is much interested in herbs and medicines. I will take her with me when we leave for Forli.’

  PART TWO

  FORLI

  1496–1499

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WE SET OUT ON A BRIGHT MORNING IN DECEMBER. I rode astride, comfortable in my boys’ breeches and warm cloak. Ser Giovanni had given me a good horse, a young chestnut. I shared his delight at being freed from his frosty winter stable as his long strides covered the frozen ground. Ser Giovanni was travelling as a merchant, not a Medici prince. His clothes were as solemn and drab as even the fanatics of Florence could wish, but his doleful appearance couldn’t quite disguise the light of happy expectation in his eyes. The closer we drew to Forli, the more apprehensive I became, though the crisp bright winter sun shone and Giovanni was in an exultant mood, singing snatches of strombelli to himself and kicking his horse into a gallop wherever the path lay clear. He, at least, was not fearful, and when, bivouacked around the fire at nights, we heard the wolves singing, nor then was I. The others might huddle closer to the fire and draw their daggers near, but at night at least I could believe I was riding towards a new life, free of old books and rituals and the endless scratch of the pen that never let me forget what I was not. The crying of the wolves brought back my dreams of my mother, and I fancied again that she was bringing me safely to the Countess, away from the ghosts and griefs of Careggi. I was eager to see this extraordinary woman, I would try hard to please Caterina, I thought, and serve her well.

  Forli, when we reached it after four days of hard riding, seemed at first a charming place. As we walked the horses slowly down the pass, I could see over the city walls to a circle of gardens, where cachi fruits, plump and orange-coloured, gleamed against leafless branches in the sharp winter light. Two rivers crossed the plain, and there were several water mills turning, whilst within the oval of the walls I could make out the roofs of fine palaces and churches, and a tall campanile adorned with a huge clock, such as I had never seen before. It wasn’t until we drew closer to the principal of the four gates that I made out the hideous human skulls, draped with strands of hair and leathery flesh, impaled on posts to remind newcomers of what would befall those who were disloyal to Forli’s countess.

  We came into the broad piazza, with a church at either end, and I felt another shudder of disgust when I saw the Palazzo Signoria, blackened and abandoned, which the Countess had deserted when her first husband was murdered. I remembered Maestro Ficino’s description of the people falling on the corpses of the murderers like cannibals. Yet there was no dark place on the stone flags to show where such horrors had taken place, and the stallholders and housewives in the market looked clean and cheerful, prosperous. It was difficult to imagine them as a howling mob of flesheaters. More difficult still to imagine the beautiful woman who greeted us in the inner courtyard of the Ravaldino fortress as a creature of vengeance and nightmare.

  The Countess of Forli was not young, perhaps in the middle thirties even, and her skin was a little lined. But that skin was the whitest I had ever seen, and her eyes, heavy-lidded and turned up at the corners, were amber-coloured, playful. Unlike Ser Giovanni, she was formally dressed, in a blood-coloured gown tightly laced and low across the bosom, the sleeves slashed to show a mantle of cloth of gold. She wore gold at her neck and her wrists, and a single huge ruby in the hollow of her throat that picked up the glints of gold in her loosely curled hair and those jewel-like eyes. She stood very straight as she moved forward in welcome, and made a half-curtsey to Giovanni – a perfectly balanced gesture of courtesy, which yet displayed her awareness of her higher rank. Maestro Ficino had told me that when she ruled in Rome like the Pope’s own daughter, she had been presented with basins full of jewels so precious that they could have bought all the treasures of the Medici. But the woman before me would have seemed like a queen in a peasant girl’s shift, so
secure was she in her own powers to command.

  Giovanni pushed me forward. I was conscious of how dirty my face and clothes were, and awkwardly uncertain as to whether I should bow or curtsey, dressed as I was. I removed my cap and make an awkward bob. I anticipated the usual expression of surprise when the Countess’s eyes fell upon my face, but she remained cool and distant as her gaze travelled over my countenance.

  ‘This is the child you told me of? Ficino’s pupil?’

  Giovanni nodded.

  ‘Thank you. What . . . rare looks.’

  ‘Mora.’

  ‘You are welcome to Forli, Mora,’ she said graciously, but she was already turning away. ‘Your journey must have been most wearying,’ she remarked to Giovanni.

  ‘Indeed, Countess.’

  ‘Then perhaps this evening we will dine alone.’

  Behind me, I heard one of the grooms snicker. I did not see either Giovanni or the Countess for the next three days.

  Perhaps a Sforza lady felt more at home in a fortress, for after the murder of her first husband, the Countess Caterina had never returned to live in the city. Instead, she had built a new palace within the curtain wall of the Ravaldino fortress. To my eyes, it still looked like little more than an armoury, certainly nothing like so grand as the Medici palazzo in Florence, nor even so refined as the ruin of Careggi, but the people of Forli were proud of it, naming it the ‘Paradiso’. In case they ever forgot her power over them, though, the Countess had ordered the prison to be moved against her house where it connected by the cassero with the fortress – named, of course, ‘Inferno’.

  Within, the house was comfortable and graceful. The great sala was covered with frescoes, with tiled floors in deep blue and pale yellow which, with their airy designs of fruits and flowers, made me think of Piero’s scrittoio. Beyond the house was a walled garden, most beautiful, with some fine statues, avenues of fig trees, and, to my great pleasure, a well-stocked herb bed. I wandered too in her hunting park, where it bordered the cittadella, the enclosed space for troops and weapons, discovering a pretty green summerhouse planted round with trailing roses. In truth, I had little to do those first days other than accustom myself to my new clothes. Once Ser Giovanni’s servants had left, Caterina had a gown made up for me, much better than anything I had ever worn, of a heavy pewter-coloured damask with a green velvet cap that almost caught the glow of my eyes. I supposed that she would think of her new slave as a fashionable thing, like her moresca perfume holders, twined in silver minarets and studded with pearls. I had been so used to the freedom of my boy’s clothes, at first the gown felt constricting, the tightly laced bodice leaving me breathless; but in a while I grew used to it.

  The Paradiso was filled with beautiful things. It was clear that the Countess had always lived amongst beauty. The wellhead in the courtyard was of polished Verona marble, the loggia carved with foliage and animals and set with alabaster figures. Countess Caterina ate with gold spoons with her devices chased elaborately in their handles, the Sforza serpents writhing as she turned her hands. She drank from an enamelled ivory chalice, her gowns and linens were stored in painted caskets, the tapestries on her benches and tables were the finest silk, so heavy it took two men to lift one. Above all, she seemed to love mirrors. In her crimson-draped chamber a curtained recess held a looking glass of deepest ruby Venice-ware, with fat gold cherubs playing round its rim. I peeped at myself in that, and in the reflections of the polished silver basins in the sala, in the ivory hand-mirror that lay on the Countess’s marquetry table, in the gilt-work night mirror with lamps set into its frame which stood by her high bed. And very foolish I looked; I might have been back in the porch of Santo Spirito, with my crown of coins, such a gewgaw I was, with my collarbones poking out like razor clams and my copper skin darkened from the sun of the Careggi countryside.

  I was almost sixteen, but my chest stayed stubbornly flat and my hips and thighs were as narrow as a child’s. I had been glad to pass for a boy at Careggi, but somehow it hurt more to remember what I was – and was not – here in this elegant house, surrounded by the beautiful possessions of a beautiful woman. I wondered if my mother would have pitied me, and loved me despite it all. I wished I could at least be plain, dull skinned and mousy haired and ordinary, but in my grey dress with my mop of white hair I looked like an icicle from a pantomime, an imp. When I began to attend on the Countess I was conscious again, as I had not been for so long, of the whispers and giggles that followed my progress in her wake. I tried to smile, and not seem too proud, and I was too ugly for any of the Countess’s other maids to be jealous of me.

  From the first, Caterina herself was kind. Because I was Ser Giovanni’s gift, his learned Spanish slave, she had me attend on her. I had been so little around women, I feared that I should be clumsy. But it was not difficult to brush out her hair while she sat at her glass and gazed at herself like an oracle, nor to hand her a basin of rosewater to clean her face, or the gold pot of alum distillate that she rubbed into her skin to keep it so white. I soon felt quite the lady’s maid, though it did not escape me that my own odd looks were a perfect foil to her own flourishing beauty. And perhaps that was why she liked to keep me at her side when she gave audience to the Signoria in the fine apartments of her son, for whom she ruled Forli as regent. But it was dull work, all the same, for all that the things I handled were so lovely. I was glad, when Ser Giovanni returned to Careggi, that the Countess had time once more for what she pleased to call her ‘experiments’.

  The Countess had built a blue-tiled farmacia for her work, and here I felt at home. What knowledge I had I owed more to my father and my own gatherings at Careggi than my studies with my old master, but she found me as adept as I was willing. I was glad to be at work again, for so long as I had tasks to complete and make me feel useful, I felt lighter. Each morning, I would walk into the town to collect the Countess’s orders from the spice dealer, Signor Albertini, and from the convent of Santa Maria della Ripa. Whilst the Countess attended to her business, I would prepare the pestles and mortars, the jars and instruments according to her own instructions, and then, about an hour before dinnertime, she would appear and we began. As soon as the Countess learned I could write, she gave me the task of transcribing her successful ‘experiments’ in a ledger. I explained that I had little Latin, but the proper names she dictated herself and for the rest I did my best with what I knew. It was a hodge-podge language I invented, but we could make it out.

  That summer, naturally enough, we made beauty remedies. I boiled betonica root in oil and cooled it with rosemary as a tonic for the face, I mixed ampoules of aluminium sulphate with rosewater and juniper essence, which the Countess showed me how to distil, then beat into egg whites. A drop rubbed into the face and neck whitened the skin surprisingly – soon my sunburned face had taken on the colour of warm cream. We boiled cuttlefish in white wine to make tooth powder and a paste of cloves, nutmeg and sage to sweeten the breath. Ivy leaves stewed in water filtered through ash made a wash to lighten the hair. I combed it through and we sat together in the garden whilst I read to the Countess from Marullo’s poems as her hair, streaming almost to the ground as she lay in the shade with her head propped on a cushion, brightened slowly in the sun.

  If there was any doubt that Madonna Caterina was in love with Giovanni, her talk to me dispelled it. She questioned me about Careggi, about what he did and who visited him, about what he liked to eat and how I had cured the Medici gout. I answered her shyly at first, but she had a way of making my hesitant remarks seem fascinating. She told me of her own first visit to Florence, as a little girl, when her father had been Duke of Milan. They had travelled with five hundred soldiers, a hundred knights and fifty grooms, all in the Sforza livery, each leading a warhorse saddled with gold brocade, with gold stirrups and silk-embroidered bridles. She had been carried into the palazzo to be received by the Medici ladies in a brocaded litter, and been shown all its treasures. I told her about the snow statue, and the
scrittoio, and how sadly I heard that Florence was changed. I asked her of Rome, which Cecco had always dreamed of seeing. The most magnificent city in the world, he called it. She smiled, and her eyes slid to the ground. It was splendid, she said, the palaces and basilicas, the cardinals with their great trains, the pilgrims from all over the world. But she had never cared for it, she admitted, it was Florence, ever since that first visit, which was the city of her heart.

  In the autumn, Ser Giovanni returned, with a train of sixteen mouths, and it seemed as though he had come to stay for good. When I left the Countess for my truckle bed in her anteroom, I knew that the door to Giovanni’s apartments would open softly, and that he would cross the sala to spend all night in bed with her. I stuffed my pillow over my ears and longed for my lily-root tea, for the sound of their love was hard for me to bear. It seemed cruel that I should suffer as all girls that age suffer, when unlike them there was no prospect of my greening being cured with a wedding. I clamped my knees together and ground my teeth and in the mornings, glimpsing myself while my lady was at her toilette, I thought I looked uglier than ever.

  The Countess, though, seemed to grow more beautiful by the moment. In the mornings she was flushed and lazy, her ruffled curls tumbling into the lace of her chemise where it slipped off one rounded shoulder. She grew a little plumper each day, her skin as rich and smooth as junket, her belly a soft, quivering mound beneath her bodice, her breasts pushing upwards above her gown. With Giovanni there, she left off the severe colours she had been used to wear as the stern governess of Forli and dressed in violet and yellow, rose damask and cloth of silver, setting off the heightened colour in her cheeks. As I held out her chemise, she would pinch at the fat on her thighs and claim to despair at the rounding of her hips, but I could see from the way that she ran her hands over the contours of her body that she was pleased with what she saw. And at supper she would take a sweetmeat from Ser Giovanni’s own hand, crushing it between her reddened lips, relishing it greedily.