Tuscan Daughter

by Lisa Rochon

  Dedication

  To my father, Joel,

  for writing

  and to

  my mother, Mary,

  for painting

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I: 1500–1502

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II: 1502–1504

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Part III: 1504–1505

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments and Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  1500–1502

  I sought to raise myself on wings from here . . .

  Defeating, I still live but loveless, lone

  —VITTORIA COLONNA, SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN POET

  Chapter 1

  Beatrice stirred and cast an arm across the straw mattress, seeking the warmth of her mother’s body, listening hopefully for her breathing. Predawn, the sky was the color of river silt and the silence was deep; even the rooster slept. She pushed aside the rough linen blanket and pressed a hand to the stone wall, steadying herself against the absence. Only half-awake, she reached for her father’s old quilted jacket and held it close, like a beloved friend.

  Three months she had been making the journey to sell olive oil to the artists inside the city. It had become more difficult to gain permission to pass through the tollgates. But, then, measured against what her life had become, that hardly mattered. Her mother had disappeared, traumatized, her face crazed like the night’s constellations. Her father—she would not think of it.

  Alone, moving stiffly, Beatrice used her hips to guide the wooden cart down the dirt road, out of the tiny village of Settignano. One of the wheels wobbled, threatening to come off. There were no florins to pay an ironsmith. If she failed to sell her olive oil she would starve, and if she starved she would die. She pinched her thigh hard, giving herself a proper bruise for the self-pitying thought.

  Kicking the wheel back onto its wooden axle with a naked foot, she walked on, imagining her feet to be padded like an animal’s, her toes protected by bristled hair. The idea of loping through her village as a she-wolf buoyed her, and she started to trot down the hill.

  The road leading to Florence had been pounded flat by heavy wagons pulled by men and teams of white oxen. The stoneworkers traveled from the local quarries, their backs bowed like willow sticks, hauling the pietra serena because the rich favored the calming gray-blue colors. “Serena,” the cutters would joke about the name, a trace of bitterness lacing their voices, their bodies crippled by carrying the stone to the city so that the wealthy could raise monuments to God, to the Virgin Mary and to themselves.

  * * *

  A white cat, thin as a shadow, angled beside her and mewled loudly. Beatrice set down her cart and stroked its scrawny head, allowing the animal to crawl inside her wool gambeson. Before, even on hot days, her father wore the jacket like a noble soldier preparing for battle, though he was only a gentle philosopher and keeper of a few olive trees. Now he was buried deep in the ground. She held the warm cat and thought of a story she’d heard about prisoners in dungeons who befriended rats to keep from going mad. Being in prison might not be so bad if you were there with your mamma e papà and there was a portal to look out at the world. But her kin were gone, and without them, the joy in her land had run dry.

  The air tasted of winter cold descending from the Apennines, and Beatrice knew there was more of that to come. She uncorked her deerskin and sipped wine. Her supply of olive oil was nearly exhausted. Only days ago, she had tenderly raked and sorted the olives from her modest family grove to have them inspected by the owner of the local olive mill. It was her first time representing the family, and she’d felt nervous and excited. He motioned her to the private yard behind the giant granite crushers. “You have money to pay?” Sweat clung to her skin from running her cart, heavy with her harvest, down the road to the mill. She had removed every twig and all the slender silver leaves from her autumnal haul and was bursting with pride at its glistening freshness. Now she was standing in olive muck up to her ankles.

  “No money, no olive oil,” warned the miller, his mouth twitching. He looked her over as if seeing her for the first time.

  “I have no coins, but I can trade with you.”

  She watched his blackened fingers stretching and curling. They reminded her of short, pudgy eels.

  “I have a pillow stitched with tombolo lace by my mother,” she said, stepping toward him, pleading her case. “My father brought our olives to you over many years.”

  He leered at her. “Orphaned wench. Tombolo does not interest me.” His fingers were suddenly upon her. He gripped her neck and clawed at her tunic. She kicked him hard between the legs and ran for it, dumping most of the olives from her cart by the time she had reached the safety of the road.

  The attack had terrified her. Surely she had done something to provoke his rage? Her parents had never raised a hand against her, so it was difficult to know how to gauge the customs of other people. Such an ugly man, with eels for fingers. She remembered how her father had taught her to hurl stones at the black night whenever she fell into a sour mood. “To the moon!” he had laughed, “La luna!” That was a game they had played together. She used to believe in its magic, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  She pushed her cart toward Florence, her feet now leaden and unsteady, her imaginary friend, the she-wolf, lying low in a tangle of juniper bush.

  The sky was lightening to the gray of Florentine wool. She took two dirty lengths of linen from her satchel, wound them tightly around both hands, picked up the handles again and rolled forward, the wheels lurching down a steep pitch gnarled by tree roots and rocks heaved up from the earth. Her thighs burned with the effort and she felt a crack on her heel run with fresh blood. Her earthenware jars rattled against each other like broken bones.

  The road dipped then flattened, and she saw the massive outline of the brick wall that protected Florence from peasants, the popolo minuto, like her. She watched as the outsiders pushed frantically toward the wall, three stories tall—villagers and shanty dwellers coming from all directions, a river of snakes with dull eyes and oily backs. Beatrice set the cart down and knotted her black hair tightly at the back of her head, the better to go anonymously into the crowd and avoid the unwanted attention of the guards at the city gates.

  She pulled her hood down low and shifted her man
tle so that her breasts were camouflaged, becoming less girl, more boy. Before the troubles, she was adored and coddled, presented as a jewel by her parents whenever they walked through the village. No longer. Now, alone, she carried a blade and kept her eyes down.

  She pressed both hands together in a rough prayer to make ready for the humiliating inspection. A group of women hauling baskets of fresh-cut oak on their heads shouldered their way past as the chief sentry called out to open the thick wooden doors. Vendors scrabbled like cockroaches, using their carts and shovels to push their way forward toward the tollgates, ready to pay their meager coins to gain access to the great golden city.

  Chapter 2

  Outside the city walls, chaos all around, Beatrice hesitated to push into the massive crowd and retreated inside herself. Her hands clung to the collar of her father’s jacket and she bent an ear, the better to hear his counsel.

  “Do not hesitate. Be a Roman warrior. The goddess Diana. Walk without fear through each day. Head up, stand tall like the cypress.”

  She smiled at his love of the ancients, the way his counsel shimmered like a slab of Carrara marble.

  “But I am alone now, and these people—”

  He interrupted her thoughts: “Their suffering has corrupted their peaceful nature. You will discover those you can trust. Watch for them, reach out in kindness.”

  She gripped the handles of her cart and did not move, the better to hold on to his presence. He had been taken from her when all was right in the world. She knew she should not think of it, but it was difficult to resist going to that place of dark emotion. One year ago, when the sun was falling and pink and orange were stretched like yarn on a loom, the hens had set to shrieking in their enclosure and her father had walked off across the flats to scare off the fox that might be harassing them. Beatrice was at home, melting beeswax over a slow fire, preparing the slender tallows that the priest preferred for his church altar. Her mother bent over a piece of tombolo, her hands flying over wooden spools of thread, braiding lace to edge pillowcases for rich clients in the city.

  It seemed, like so many of the evenings the family spent together, as if time was lifted up like an offering and held in a state of suspension. The wax melted slowly, the thread was braided, the sun went down, the birds shrieked, her father walked and then ran toward the henhouse. The wooden bobbins held the thread, the wax turned liquid, and a single lacy curve emerged on the tombolo pillow. From the inside of their little stone home, all was well. Still was the night. It seemed as sweet as the sweat rising on Beatrice’s cheekbones and settling along her upper lip. Her mother’s auburn hair swirled down her back, her eyes fixed on her work. The sweet suspension of time unraveled from the spool and floated in the air like gossamer wings. To interrupt it would be to deny a family’s right to love, and so the mother and daughter continued at their work, lulled by the feeling, sated by the glorious Tuscan day, never noticing how long the man had been gone.

  The war between Pisa and Florence had been a simmering feud where men fought each other among the cypresses and along the edges of rivers. Bands of Pisans knew enough to stay away from the heavily guarded battalion of Florence, but they enjoyed their share of violence in the villages that lay exposed and unprotected outside the city. Killing a hen was one way to lure an enemy outside. They waited patiently while Beatrice’s father approached with anxious footsteps. To lose a hen to a fox represented half a month’s wages, and so he went blindly toward the screams of his birds and the darkening olive groves.

  * * *

  The Tuscan earth was golden and fertile, without the weight of the clay soil to the south. But morning dawned and the land smelled of decay. There was a scent of poison in the air, the blood of her father, which the Pisans had smeared onto the hen hutch. Beatrice looked to the place where she had instinctively dragged the corpse, away from the cruel death by sticks and clubs, to lay him down on the earth in the benevolent shadow of the old olive tree. Her mind had gone numb. It was as if her eyes no longer saw in color, only black and white.

  Now she needed to transport her father to the church, where the priest would clean the dead man’s face with holy water, bless the body with frankincense oil, then bury him at the village cemetery. Without these rituals, her father would be in danger of wandering with evil spirits in the underworld.

  In the distance, she could see a figure traveling toward her. He seemed to be walking quickly, without a hat, though the morning sun was fierce. Not the priest—he had already been to pray with the girl. While she stood by, he had closed her father’s eyes with patient fingers, set two small stones over the eyes. Some neighbors had also come by, trekking from their homes in the village to heap bouquets of lavender and small sacks of their most cherished Etruscan grains at the front door to sustain the family in the coming months.

  She was curious about who was fast approaching. Wary, she picked up one of the clubs the attackers had left behind. She watched as the figure cut down a path to walk alongside the creek before hiking up to where her father lay. Not an enemy. A young man with a serious face, a brow that looked permanently furrowed. She watched him kneel beside the body and bow his head in prayer.

  She set down the club and gripped the handles of her family’s wobbly wooden cart. The land was thirsty for rain, and puffs of dirt lifted as she walked toward the stranger, pushing the cart next to her father’s body and keeping it between them like a rough battering ram. “I do not know you,” she said listlessly, looking down on the bent figure. “Who are your people?” She listened to her voice and did not recognize it. She had taken on the sound of her mother, who was inside, curled on the straw mattress, unable to scream or even cry.

  He did not speak at first but stood and offered a curt bow. His mouth was set in a straight line, and his eyes flicked gently to her. “My family has a farm on the other side of this grove. Di Buonarroti.”

  She shook her head.

  “Mostly we live in Florence,” he added, by way of explanation.

  “I live here,” she said. “And some of us are dying here.”

  He touched his right hand to his chest. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She could tell he was uncomfortable, offering words he had heard others recite, but he stood his ground. “These troubles over the land will not soon be over.” He hesitated, then asked, “Your mother?”

  “She is not able to do this.”

  “I see that your spirit is strong.”

  Beatrice looked at his leather boots, broken and wrinkled. His hands were caked with white dust. “You are a stonemason?”

  “I am a sculptor. Though I was taught how to work with stone here in Settignano.”

  She looked past him to the olive groves, listening to the gentle rustling of the silver-sylvan leaves, cooling her anger and the desire to seek revenge.

  “Scultore,” she said, clicking her tongue to express approval. The word had never been spoken to her before, and she chiseled its syllables with her tongue. The sculptures she had seen in Florence—mythical heroes, lions, angels and saints—transformed stone into things that could live alongside people. Somebody had made them, somebody like this man who stood before her. She wondered if he also drew from his imagination, as she liked to do. The question lay at the back of her mind, though she dared not ask it.

  “My name is Michelangelo. Michelangelo di Buonarroti. You must visit me someday at my studio in Florence. If there is anything you need.”

  In the distance, the city’s cathedral pushed its orange dome up powerfully, piercing the sky. She wondered how people could live confined to Florence. It seemed a punishment, even if a building like the Duomo offered a better relationship with God. As if that could be true.

  “You are careless with your words,” she said, curling her lip, pricked by rage. “I have no business in the city. You will not see me there.” She said these words even as she rounded the cart and lifted her father’s arms. Michelangelo quickly bent to hoist the dead man’s legs. This artist, full of big
-city presumptions, could not know the depths of her sorrow. Yet here he was, doing the unthinkable with her.

  They heaved the body into the cart. Seeing her father crumple like a doll against the raw wooden boards, Beatrice let out a strangled cry. Weeping, she held her arms out wide and tipped forward toward him. “Papà, papà!” She was only thirteen. To live without her father was unthinkable.

  Without hesitating, Michelangelo grabbed her and held her roughly in his arms. “You will see your father again, God willing,” he said. His face seemed to be lifted to the sky. “Pray for him, and he will watch over you from Heaven.”

  He carried her back to the stone hut and set her down on the sacks of grain. She hid her face in her cloak, ashamed of her tears.

  “You are young. Tomorrow will be easier.”

  He straightened and gripped her hands tightly in his. “Please come to see me in the city,” he said, repeating the offer, taking care to speak with kindness. If he felt any awkwardness at their sudden intimacy, he did not show it. “Can I help you push the cart to the church?”

  She hesitated and looked at the cloudless sky. Once, blue had been her favorite, the color of horizons and longing. Now its serenity, like her family, had splintered into shards of dispossession. From that day on, Beatrice would remember blue as the color of solitude.

  “We will manage on our own,” she said, though she doubted her mother would be able to help.

  She watched him walk with a driven, athletic gait to the road, leaving her alone by the stoop of her hut. Michelangelo, sculptor, with a family farm in the olive grove beyond. He had left her with something: an imprint of stone dust on her hands. She rubbed her fingers together, testing the grit. Maybe he was honorable. Maybe he was a lie.

  * * *

  A woman cradling a freshly butchered leg of venison in her arms pushed past Beatrice, cursing her for standing in the way, wrenching her out of the memory. The smell of blood leapt from the deer to cling like sickness to the girl’s mouth. She surveyed the crowd, seeking out the faces of the women, examining their figures, their shapes, the way they held themselves. Trembling, she willed her mother to step forward and show herself. She had disappeared and left Beatrice alone, but surely her mamma had meant no harm; she had been terribly delayed, that was all.