Marina Fiorato - The Botticelli Secret

And waited.

The hard wood bit into my back and I began to wriggle. I counted my heartbeats, then all my teeth with my tongue. I sang all the bawdy songs I know inside my head till I ran out. Then I said all the prayers I know, which took much less time. My limbs froze, and at length, when still he did not come, I was forced to move away from the door, shaking my limbs and waggling my head like one with the palsy. The blood flowed back into my stiff muscles with an exquisitely painful impression of a thousand pinpricks. Still he came not and I stretched my neck, catching sight as I did so of a stone roundel, which sat above the door in carved relief.

It featured a great tower, of arches and columns piled on top of each other, leaning crazily to the right. I knew it, of course, for the great campanile tower at Pisa, which, although only lately finished, was reputed to list heavily to one side, as if fit to fall. Florentines were divided as to the veracity of this tale. Some, like myself, did not believe the story and thought it a feeble lie on the part of the Pisans, in an attempt to aggrandize their inferior city and pull it from the shadow of its great neighbor Florence. Some, who claimed to have seen the thing, merely shrugged and said it was typical of the Pisans, who could not build a pile of shit in a dungyard. I wondered at the oddity of such a carving here, for it was not a particularly religious symbol, and then I remembered that Malachi had called Brother Guido a “Pisano.” Was this carving, then, due to the origins of the humble novice that lived within? Surely they would not take the trouble of marking the homeland of each brother who lived here? But the odd carving could not keep my attention for long, for another idea was begging for precedence in my mind. He was not coming.

He had ditched me.

I stamped my foot in frustration, and silently listed all the curses I had heard directed at the Pisans. I had got to “donkey-fucking heretics” when I heard the librarian’s door open, and Brother Guido emerged, but alone. I shrank back to my hiding place, but I don’t think he would have noticed. He had something pale in his hand and was shaking his head. “Brother Remigio is not there,” he whispered, haltingly. “But these—his pamphlets, our pamphlets—are scattered all over his cell.”

He thrust the thing at me. I knew it at once for the twin of the ones I had seen that day, and went cold.

They were here already.

They knew.

I took Brother Guido’s arm urgently. “We must find this brother. Where would he be, if not abed?”

“I know not.” He shook his head, bewildered. “I followed him from prayer and was hard upon his heels when you . . . apprehended me. If he is not in his cot, then he must have gone to the library, or mayhap the scriptorium, for some private study of his own.”

“And where are these places to be found?” I rapped out the question.

“Across the cloister.”

“Let’s go.”

I took hold of his sleeve and pulled him across the lawn. The time for concealment was past—much better, now, to be in the safety of the open, where no one could approach us without declaring themselves. We headed for the tree and the well in silence, but as we neared this central point Brother Guido spoke again, this time in a voice pregnant with relief.

“All is well,” he said, “he is here.”

At first I could not see where he was pointing, but then I realized that what I had thought to be a tree bending over the well was, in fact, a tall monk, with a curly poll like Brother Guido’s, leaning over the water in silent contemplation. I felt a sudden disquiet. He was awfully still, had been since I had first spotted the “tree,” some half hour ago. We drew close, and I could see that the librarian, too, had a pamphlet in his hand. With palpable relief, Brother Guido touched his brother’s shoulder and said his name.

The librarian’s head detached from his body and fell down the well.

Faced with such an awful occurrence, we did not move or speak for fully seven heartbeats, but stood, mute, looking into each other’s eyes, our faces mirrored in horror. Only the terrible splash as the head met its rest in the depths prompted me to grab Brother Guido and force him down behind the well and its attendant corpse. The monk’s face was moon-pale, his lips moving in prayer or catechism or I know not what. He turned his eyes on me, and as he fixed me with his terrified gaze, his words began to form sense. “Begone, I cannot help you. Take your devilry from this place and leave me be.”

Now, I have been accused of many things in my time, but “devilry” is a new one. I had to get him to focus on my problem, but the only way I knew to get a man involved in a woman’s plight was to highlight his own plight. And he had a big problem to contend with—I may not be book learned, but I am smart and I could see exactly what had happened. I let him have it. Grasped his cowl tight around his neck. “Now listen to me, you cowardly sack of Franciscan shit, ” I hissed. “My life is in danger and if you won’t help me, fine. So much for your pastoral care, but now is not the time to examine your conscience. Know instead that earlier today I stole a painting, and since then, three people are dead in the search for it, including your brother librarian here.” He began to ask a question, but I was in full flow. “They have come here in search of the pamphlet that I left in place of the painting when I stole it. They are coming to look for you. Your brother, here”—I looked at the headless corpse looming above us—“God rest him, was taken for you. He sat with you in the church, his cell is next to yours. He keeps these pamphlets in his room. He is tall like you, slim like you. He has . . . had . . . dark curly hair. The only thing they missed is that as the senior librarian, he is tonsured and you are not. But he was cowled, as were you all when you left the church, and if I had not taken you aside, they would have found the right man.” I caught my breath and I let the facts sink in, and his face, already blanched, now took on the sickly hues of terror. “Aye, you know I am right,” I went on. “They made a mistake, as they did before tonight when they killed my friend in place of me. But they do not care who they kill, be they ever so lofty”—my voice cracked as I thought of Bembo—“and will not stop till they get what they want. They think you are helping me, and now, believe me, you damn well will. Now gather your wits and get us out of here.”

This last seemed to focus his mind. When he spoke, it was brief and to the point. “The herbarium,” he said, and we set off at a run, before I could tell him I had heard footsteps in the arches as we talked.

Brother Guido led me to a low door in the wall and we were through into a fragrant garden, planted in a maze of box hedges. Without stopping for conference we climbed as one over the peach trees that espaliered the retaining wall, and we were down into a slop of drainwater, which soaked our feet as we ran back into the piazza of Santa Croce. At once we darted down a side alley and ran till we reached a quiet square where we could rest and see the approach of four narrow alleys. We sat at a little water fountain, drank to cool our burning lungs and rest our bursting hearts. The sky was lightening, and we would soon be discovered.

“We must away.” Brother Guido echoed my thoughts.

“Where?” It was all I could do to gasp out the syllable.

“I know a place which will welcome us. It is not far, but a hard climb.”

My heart sank, but terror rose and gave me the strength I needed.

“Take me there,” I said.

7

Leaving Florence in search of sanctuary was perhaps the hardest part of the whole night. Under a gray smear of a sky, we made our way through the slums of Ognissanti and began to climb the hill to Fiesole. Ognissanti, as I already told you, is a shithole. And the former home of Signor Botticelli. A fitting home for the bastard, if you ask me. Shanties and shacks cramp together, grays and browns, assorted in size and shape like a grin of bad teeth. And the residents! More than once the sight of a monk and a girl together elicited a leer or a gesture from one of the hideous citizens, who seemed to have been belched up from Signor Dante’s hell. The whole place stank, too, of the numerous tanneries and their attendant sludge. Everywhere eviscerated animals were stretched out in unlikely starshapes like guilty souls on the rack. I lost my shoe in a suck of mud where the Arno had burst its banks in spring, but was too tired and terror shredded to care. My fine shoes with the golden points had already had to contend with piss and blood tonight; meet it was that the mud should take one. I threw its fellow after it and saw the monk eyeing me.