Marina Fiorato - The Botticelli Secret

For the abbot was blind.

After that I could look all I wanted, so long as I remembered my part well when the cue came. Yet it was not so much what I saw as what I heard that astonished me. And it was not the accent but the content of the lines that gave me pause. The dialogue went thus.

“Lord della Torre!” began the old fellow. “What an honor! How are your family, your good uncle?”

I shot a look to my not-so-humble companion, through eyes narrowed to arrow slits. Lord della Torre? Never in all the oblique hints at wealth and influence had I suspected that Brother Guido himself was a signore— a nobleman. Hmm. I was unsure whether to be pleased or dismayed by this revelation but, on balance, decided that it could only be good for me if Brother Guido was a rich young lordling. He might, in truth, be able to save my hide after all.

Brother Guido himself ignored me, and did not seem overly discomfited by the revelation. He evenly replied, “Well, my Lord Abbot, well. But I beg you to remember that I am now become a novitiate of Santa Croce, and go about the world as Brother Guido.” Brother Guido knelt to kiss the abbot’s ring of office, and my eyes rested on the handsome cabochon-studded cross. Madonna, that must be worth a few florins. I watched carefully, rehearsing for my own obeisance. Yet the conversation continued.

“Yes, yes, you have joined our family in God,” said the abbot with obvious delight at the correction. “Of course. You will forgive me, I did not notice your robes.” The abbot smiled in a way that showed his acceptance of the blow that God had dealt him; so comfortable was he with the state of blindness that he was happy to make a joke of it. I began to like him, but was jolted out of my reverie like a player who hears his cue.

“And may I present Brother Lucius of Salerno?”

Brother Guido’s voice concentrated my mind. I rolled the sleeve of my miniver high, so the abbot would not feel such exalted furs. I had wrapped Brother Guido’s humble Franciscan rosary around my wrist, threading the wooden beads through my fingers where the abbot would feel them as I took his hand. I bent to the hand I held, old and rough as parchment. I barely brushed my lips against the ruby cross, mindful as I was of the softness of the feminine mouth. The old man saw nothing amiss, though, and the pleasantries continued.

“Brother Lucius is laboring under a vow of silence at present,” explained Brother Guido, “but asks me to greet you and pay you his respects. He is truly penitent, my lord, for he has come all the way from Santa Croce barefoot.”

The abbot nodded and smiled his charming smile once again. “My eyes may have failed me, son, but there is naught amiss with my ears. I could hear at once that of the two pairs of feet that entered my chamber, one was shod and one was not. You are welcome, Brother”—this to me—“a true pilgrim indeed.” He nodded thrice, slowly and thoughtfully, then uncannily turned his rheumy eyes in the direction of Brother Guido’s voice. “And now, my son, how can I assist you?”

I waited, with a butterfly flutter of nerves, for Brother Guido to lay our whole history before his friend. But once again, I was to be surprised.

“My Lord Abbot, we ask no more than a bed for a day and a night, before we continue forth into the world.”

“Such a thing is easily given.”

“And such humble victuals as you give to the other brothers.”

“Granted,” said the abbot, opening his hands with a generous gesture. “I divine that you are both tired, and therefore I will excuse you from the normal observances of our rule. You may sleep the day through, and I ask only that you attend mass at Matins before you leave.” He waved away Brother Guido’s thanks. “Brother Tommaso will show you to your cells. I wish you a good rest, Brother Guido, and you, too, Brother Lucius.” I lowered my head again as the Sicilian lay brother reentered the room. But as we followed him through the cloister and up a dark stair to the dorter, I could not help hearing the playful emphasis on the second “brother” the abbot had uttered in his dismissal, and reflected on the fact that there were some things that the blind could see very well.

The Sicilian brother had more keys than Saint Peter, and he took a little time to find the correct pair on the huge iron ring he wore on his knotted belt and unlock our twin cells. Brother Guido and I had time for a whispered conference behind our hands in broad Tuscan, which we hoped the Sicilian would not understand.

“Why didn’t you tell the abbot?” I hissed. “He seemed lovely. I thought he was your good friend?”

“He is.”

“Then why, my lord ?”

Brother Guido ignored my sarcasm. “I’ll tell you tonight.”

Then the door was open, stopping all further conversation, and I spotted the little truckle bed in the corner of the room, below the inevitable crucifix. I felt such a longing for bed as I have never felt, not even for my noblest clients’ most stuffed and feathered four-posters. I had registered what Brother Guido had said, but frankly, I was too tired to care.

9

“Well?”

I had slept the day through, and the light velveted tonight outside the window of the little cell. The single candle brightened, and the flame fluttered as I plumped my hands onto my hips, and stood looking down at my monkish friend with a questioning stare. In answer he vacated the single chair that his room held and motioned me into it. Brother Guido himself took the truckle bed where he had lately slept twelve hours round, just as I had done next door. He pressed his long hands together as if in prayer. “All right,” he said. “I did not reveal your circumstances—our circumstances—to the abbot because I believe that you have . . . inadvertently . . . made a discovery of significant portent.”

My face must have looked as blank as my unpainted countenance on the image I had stolen, for he swiftly simplified his terms. “You found something out. Something they do not want you to know.”

“What?”

“I do not know.”

“And who is ‘they’?”

“The dark agencies that pursue us, and are determined to wipe your knowledge clean.”

“But we don’t know anything!”

Brother Guido sighed and chose a tone in which he would address a simpleton. “ I know that, but they do not know that we do not know.”

My head hurt. I felt like a simpleton. “Wouldn’t it be better to come clean and beg the protection of the abbot?”

“Sanctuary is not what it once was,” said Brother Guido sadly. “You know yourself that the flower of the Medicis, Guiliano, was cut down in the cathedral by the diabolical Pazzi family.”

Ah, yes, that reminds me. I said I’d tell you about the Pazzis, didn’t I? The Pazzis, in whose chapel I had so recently sheltered at Santa Croce, had hacked Giuliano de’ Medici to bits, while he was at mass in Santa Maria del Fiore. Local reports said that they stabbed him twenty-nine times and hacked at his head until it split like a melon.

“Well . . .” I amended weakly, “perhaps we could explain to . . . you know . . . them . . . explain all this.”

He was agitated now and rose to pace the tiny room. “Explain to whom? We do not even know who seeks you. How could we ever be safe again? How could we return to Florence, be we never so protected, without fear of our lives? That every footfall is an assassin, that every dish is poisoned, that every winter chill is the kiss of a knife?”

I considered this. Brother Guido painted quite a picture, and no, I did not particularly want to live as he described. “Then what are we to do?”

“We must use the only advantage we have.”