1636- the Flight of the Nightingale

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1636- the Flight of the Nightingale Page 2

by David Carrico


  “No, Maestra,” Ercole said. As usual, Francesca had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at the thin reedy tones his voice produced. If ever a man could say that he was cursed by his name, it was Ercole. Francesca had never met anyone who looked less like a Hercules than Ercole: thin, bony, round-shouldered, long-necked, jug-eared, and above all, short. It made him the inevitable butt of rough jokes from his fellow guards, but from what Francesca had seen, he kept a good humor about it, and gave as good as he got.

  “No, we have not seen Benito tonight,” Ercole continued without realizing her thoughts. He looked at his partner. “And we hadn’t heard that he planned on coming by any time this week.” Giuseppe nodded in agreement.

  “Ah, well, I must have misunderstood, then. Do let me know if you hear from him.”

  “Certainly, Maestra,” Giuseppe said. “We certainly will.”

  The guards were on their best behavior. Francesca was well aware of the fact that if she had been a simple serving woman or kitchen worker, their attitudes would have been considerably more casual and would have involved physical contact. Even though the Grand Duchess was now dowager and no longer the regent over the duchy, she still had a great deal of power and authority behind the scenes, and a certain amount of protection flowed from her to cover Francesca. It would take rank and standing much higher than these men would ever possess to counteract that. Which didn’t mean that there weren’t those in the court who might try. A knot in her stomach reminded her of that fact.

  Francesca looked down almost as if surprised, and lifted the wineskin that she was holding. “I believe I promised you good men some wine a couple of weeks ago. Sorry it took me so long, but I do keep my promises. This is yours.”

  “Madonna bless you, Maestra!” Ercole exclaimed as Giuseppe reached out greedy hands for the wine. “We were late to supper, and all they had left to drink was some really sour beer. We are dry as a desert, standing here.”

  Francesca laughed and handed the wineskin to Giuseppe, who popped the stopper out of the neck of the skin and lifted it up to pour wine into his open mouth with a very practiced motion. After a moment, Ercole reached up and pulled his arm down. “Pig! Swine! Glutton! You will not swill it down before I get my share.”

  Giuseppe coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and surrendered the skin to his partner. “Delizioso, Maestra! Very fine, very sweet, the blessings of all the saints upon you for remembering poor Giuseppe and poor Ercole standing lonely watch in the middle of the night.”

  There followed bows, first by one of them, then by the other, then by both together, until Francesca held up her hands laughing, saying, “Enough, enough. You like it, that’s good. Just keep an eye out for Benito, all right?”

  “Si, Maestra,” Ercole said as Giuseppe snagged the wineskin again. “We will certainly do that. Give me that,” he snarled at his partner the next moment, grabbing for the skin.

  Francesca turned and retreated into the shadows again, moving back to where she had left Sabatini. When she heard his “Psst,” she stepped sideways into the darker pool of shadows around one of the loggia columns, pulling her hood back up over her head to help shade the lighter skin of her face.

  Chapter 2

  They watched the two men pass the wineskin back and forth, until it was empty enough that Ercole held it above his face and let the last few drops drip onto his tongue before he threw it to one side and began to curse Giuseppe for drinking the lion’s share of the wine.

  “How long will it take?” Sabatini murmured.

  “Not long,” Francesca whispered back. “The opium is strong.”

  “And will they stay asleep?”

  Francesca smiled. “There was enough in the wine that they could sleep for two days.”

  “Is that why you mixed so much honey in it?”

  “Partly, and partly because it helped hide the fact that it was good wine, not the cheaper stuff they usually get. Lots of wine sellers mix honey with cheap wine to make it sweeter and mask the taste, and guys like this who only get the cheap stuff get used to it.”

  “There they go,” Sabatini said as Giuseppe dropped onto a stool and leaned back against the wall by the gate.

  “Wait,” Francesca said, placing a hand on Sabatini’s shoulder as he started to move forward. “Ercole’s not down yet.” And indeed, the scrawny guardsman was staggering around in a drunken circle, lurching first to one side then the other, before he finally made contact with a wall and slid down it to end with his feet splayed before him and his head lolling to one side. “Wait,” Francesca said again. She counted over sixty heartbeats before she lifted her hand. “Now, quietly.”

  The two of them slipped back into the lamplight before the gate. Francesca stepped carefully through the tangle of feet and leaned over to relieve Giuseppe of the large key that hung from his belt. Her heart stopped when he snorted as she pulled the key free, but he just turned his head to the other side and began snoring.

  Picking her way back out again, she stepped over to the gate where Sabatini was already lifting the bar out of its brackets. She opened the large clumsy lock with the key, and pushed the gate open. They walked through it, then closed it again. She examined the gate in the moonlight. There was no sign of a lock on the outside, so she pulled the gate open again, enough that she tossed the key to land in Ercole’s lap, then closed it again.

  “Come.” Francesca turned and hurried down the path that led from the gate toward the city. They passed through the gardens until they arrived at a portal through the garden wall. That one she had a key to. An unofficial key, needless to say, but probably all of the senior servants of the palace had one. Everyone needed a private way to leave and return from time to time, after all.

  Once they were outside the wall, she looked to her right. The Forte di Belvedere loomed from that direction. It was still referred to as “the new fort” by all residents of Firenze, even though it was nearly as old as she was. Tonight, it was a landmark, large and mostly dark and silent.

  “You know this would have been a lot easier if we could have taken the corridor,” Sabatini whispered.

  The Corridoio Vasariano—the Vasari Corridor—was an enclosed corridor that ran from the Palazzo Pitti to the Palazzo Vecchio, the main governmental palace, crossing the Arno River atop the Ponte Vecchio bridge. And yes, it would have been very much easier to make their way out of the palace and cross the river using it.

  “Easier to cross, but impossible to escape,” she hissed back. “And you know it. So stop talking stupid.”

  There was no more talk. Francesca led the way down Via de Bardi and its successor roads until they reached the Ponte di Rubaconte. It was a moonless night, and they were able to slip across the bridge without attracting attention.

  Once on the northern bank, they headed back to the west. Francesca didn’t slow down until nearly to the Ponte de Vecchio. Once she could clearly see the Torre dei Mannelli, she felt some of her tension drain away, and she stopped.

  “Come on,” Sabatini muttered, taking her arm. “We need to keep moving. The night watch might come by.”

  “All right,” Francesca said, gathering herself up and getting her feet moving again. “This way.” She led them down to a cross street and around another corner.

  “Where are we going?” Sabatini asked.

  “To the Teatro Mediceo,” Francesca replied.

  “The theatre?” Sabatini’s voice raised in astonishment, the first time Francesca had heard an emotion from him. “Why?”

  “Because that’s where we’re going to meet Barbara and get our packs.”

  “Ah.” Sabatini was silent for the rest of that part of the journey.

  Francesca knew this part of town well, as she had more than once been involved in a production by providing either newly written music or arrangements of existing songs to be performed in conjunction with plays. The Medici family had given her a certain amount of latitude as she grew older, and was no longer the almost-notorious old
er girl/young woman musician that her father had trotted out before the wealthy of Firenze, Tuscany, and France. And she had saved much of the money she had earned, which was one of the reasons she was able to do what she was doing now.

  “Hsst,” Francesca said as Sabatini started past the mouth of an alley. “In here.” She turned up the alley, and heard him coming in behind her.

  Francesca had to slow down. The alley was so narrow that the moonlight wasn’t penetrating its darkness well. She stayed to one side of the alley, avoiding the muck and noisome debris that she knew was in the middle, even if she couldn’t see it. “One…” she counted a door as she went by, “two…three…” At “four…” she stopped and knocked gently on a door, in a staggered rhythm.

  After a moment, the door opened a handsbreadth with a scraping sound from its bottom edge. “In whose name?” a voice whispered roughly through the gap.

  “San Giovanni Battista,” Francesca whispered back.

  The door opened wider. “In,” the voice urged.

  * * *

  Sabatini snorted at the password—using the name of the patron saint of the city of Firenze didn’t seem to him to be very secret or secretive. Then he shrugged—on the other hand, it would be easy to remember, and who expected secret signs on an event like this, anyway?

  Once they were in, the door closed softly behind them, and someone opened a gate in a lantern to release a flood of golden light. He blinked, and discovered that they stood in the backstage of the theatre, in a corner filled with tied-off ropes that ran into the darkness above them.

  Holding the lantern was a large woman with plump flushed cheeks and obviously hennaed hair. From behind Sabatini slipped a stick of a woman not much taller than himself, whose hair shone a brassy gold in the lantern light. That also seemed to be an improbable color to occur naturally.

  “Barbara,” Francesca said.

  It took a moment for Sabatini to recognize the other woman as a popular actress in the Mediceo Theatre Company who was usually proclaimed as “Isabella.” Of course, probably every fourth actress in northern Italy used the stage name “Isabella,” as a link to the famous actress of the previous generation, Isabella Andreini, who had trod the boards before every noble family of Italy and France in her time. Her name still carried a certain weight in theatre circles.

  The large woman reached out a hand to her. “This way, Maestra…”

  “No names,” Francesca interjected hurriedly.

  “As you wish,” Barbara said as she drew Francesca to a nearby stool beside a rickety table. “Here, sit, let us transform you. Renata, take the cloak.”

  Francesca threw back the hood and undid the throat fastening so that the smaller woman could whisk the cloak away before Francesca sat on the stool. Renata returned in a moment, and unbound Francesca’s hair so that it hung loose, then took a comb and began to attend to the hair to smooth it out.

  Meanwhile, Barbara looked at Francesca, then took her hand and grasped Francesca’s chin to move her head slightly into different angles in the light. “Hmm,” she muttered. She turned away and picked up a few things from the table. Turning back, she said, “Open your mouth.” When Francesca did so, she inserted something on each side, then stepped back. “Close your mouth.”

  Sabatini moved far enough back that he could see all of Francesca’s face. It looked different, somehow. Barbara looked at Francesca, then gave a definite nod.

  “Here’s the deal, dear. You’ve seen us do stage makeup, and we could teach you to do that, but it wouldn’t serve your purpose. Stage makeup is designed to make an impression from twenty, thirty, fifty feet away, with bold colors and lines. Up close, in a room or on the street, it would look horrible and would attract attention, which is the last thing you want. So what we’re going to do is just change you a little bit, so that you look normal, but don’t look like you did. To begin with, those pads I put in your mouth change your cheek lines. Someone might look at your eyes and forehead and think it’s you, but when they get to the cheeks they’d decide it can’t be you. That’s one change.”

  Barbara picked up a small round jar. “This is a bit of goose grease mixed with a bit of gray ash. A smidge of that rubbed in just below the eyes will create a shadow that makes them look older and very tired.” She proceeded to apply it lightly. When she stepped back, Sabatini could see the shadows that had been created under Francesca’s eyes, which did indeed create an effect of weariness. He nodded. That, combined with the cheek pads, really made her look different.

  Meanwhile, Renata has finished combing out Francesca’s hair and had plaited it into a single braid which she coiled around the back of her head and thrust a long hairpin through it to hold the mass in place. Barbara looked at that, and quirked her mouth.

  “If you were going to stay in Firenze, or in any of the nearby large towns where you could find supplies, you could always put henna on your hair, or one of those herbal rinses that change the color a bit. But if you’re going to be on the move, you can’t count on finding the supplies quickly to make that change. So I suggest that you leave your hair its normal color, and just wear it in the simplest styles, like any woman of the country would do. Don’t present it in a courtly style, in other words, and it shouldn’t call anyone’s attention to it. But if for some reason you desperately need to change the color a bit, then rub some of this…” she held up the ash and goose grease jar “…into your hair. The grease will darken the color, and the ash will dull it a bit. Just don’t get your hair near a torch or candle until after you get it washed out, or you will become a living candle.”

  Sabatini shivered at that thought…goose grease–laden hair would indeed light up like a torch if even lightly touched with a flame for a moment. He swallowed.

  “Stand up,” Barbara said. Francesca did so. Sabatini noted that she hadn’t said anything since right after they’d entered the theatre. That wasn’t like her. Francesca normally had plenty to say, and was well known for wanting to have the final word in any conversation. He kept an eye on her, just to make sure she wasn’t getting sick or something.

  Barbara walked around Francesca, slowly, looking her up and down from every angle as she did so. “The blouse, the vest, the skirt…they are right for what you are trying to do. And the other clothes in the bag we packed will work with them…you can swap pieces in and out to change appearance easily. But you need something else…Renata, bring me the miller’s wife’s apron.”

  The other woman spun on her toes and scurried off into the gloom. Barbara turned back to Francesca and waved at the stool. “Sit, sit. And take off your shoes.”

  Francesca did so, handing them off to Sabatini, then received another pair of shoes from the actress. “Try those to see if they fit.”

  Francesca slipped them on, and nodded. “Well enough. A bit loose, maybe, but if I’m on my feet all day, it won’t take long for my feet to swell up and they’ll be snug enough then.”

  “Right,” Barbara said with a chuckle. “Tell me about swollen feet. A three-act show that has a double performance on Sabato or Domenica, and they almost have to cut my shoes off my feet by the end of the day.” She held out her hands. “Take my hands and stand up. Take my hands,” she said sharply as Francesca started to move without doing so.

  Francesca frowned, but did so and rose, only to lean and almost fall to one side. Sabatini moved to take that elbow to support her. “What…”

  Barbara held her hands strongly, and said, “That’s why I wanted you to take my hands. The shoes are not the same height, and the first time people wear something like that they get off-balance very easily. Steady now?”

  Francesca nodded, still frowning. “I think so, but why am I wearing mismatched shoes?”

  Barbara dropped her hold and backed away a few steps. “Walk toward me. Carefully!” That last was uttered in a snap as Francesca lurched and tilted again as she tried to move. Sabatini stayed at her side. They made their way with care across the space, until Francesca was
again standing right before the actress.

  “You, Sabatini,” Barbara said, “bring the stool over here.”

  Sabatini did so once he was certain that Francesca wasn’t going to fall over when he let go of her elbow. She sank onto the stool with obvious relief.

  Chapter 3

  Francesca looked up at Barbara. “And what was that in aid of?”

  “One of the best ways to appear to be someone different is to change the way you walk. Take the shoes off, please.” After Francesca kicked them off, Barbara picked them up and held them out before her. “But even trained actors have trouble remembering which leg to limp with over a long performance, so the best way to do it and make sure you don’t draw unwanted attention is to do something to the shoes. Some actors put a small pebble or stone chip or a small stick in their shoes. That works, but you can’t do it for long without rubbing sores on your feet. So the smart ones do this.”

  The actress flipped the shoes over so they were bottoms up, and Sabatini could see that the heel of one of the shoes was built up a little more than the other. “See, the difference in heel height doesn’t have to be very much at all to make the illusion of a very convincing limp. The bigger the difference, the more you’ll limp. A finger’s breadth will make you lurch like a cripple.”

  “How do you know all this?” Sabatini asked. He was absorbing all that was being said, but his head was beginning to spin.

  “Part of it is stagecraft,” Barbara said with a chuckle, “and part of it is experience. Actors are probably second only to gypsies for needing to know how to get out of town without attracting attention, official or otherwise.” That got a cackle from Renata from where she stood behind them.

  “Put your shoes back on and stand up, dear,” Barbara said as she turned and placed the limping shoes in a worn bag that was sitting on the floor by the table. Francesca looked around for her shoes, and Sabatini picked them up and handed them to her. While she was fitting them to her feet, Barbara said, “Those are good common sensible shoes. They won’t give anything away, and no one looks at a poor woman’s shoes, anyway, so you shouldn’t have to worry about that. Clothes, we’ve got covered. Renata.” She looked at the other actress, who handed her a length of cloth. Barbara took it, shook it out, and it was revealed to be an apron. To be specific, a very dirty apron, with a very unfortunate stain right in the middle of it.

 

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