David (3 page)

Looking at her sad face, I knew then what I needed to say and do, but, still, a few hours later, I left the palazzo in my stonecutter’s clothes, carrying my canvas bag and it was as if I had just arrived in the city and the last few weeks had been but a dream. One difference was that I now knew to keep my purse thrust deep inside my jerkin and it was a lot heavier than when I left Settignano.

My step was light, as I headed towards the river, where my brother’s home was. It felt like a fresh start, though at the back of my mind I knew I’d be seeing Clarice de’ Buonvicini again. I squared my shoulders, tried to ignore the curious glances people were giving me, and walked away from the protective bulk of the cathedral, past the Bargello and then towards Santa Croce church.

It was beginning to get dark – my lady had been so reluctant to let me go – and as I searched for my brother’s house, a feeling of unease lowered my mood. There were a lot of people about, small knots of young men talking together and giving other groups evil looks. I patted my jerkin to make sure my money was safe.

But these were not like the ruffians who had robbed me on my first night. They were well dressed and well fed, more like Clarice’s circle of friends than robbers. Not that I had met any of her male friends, if she had any. These bravos were more like rival gangs of young aristocrats. But that didn’t make them any less dangerous: I saw steel glinting at several belts.

I wanted very much to be indoors among friends; life at Clarice’s must have made me soft.

‘If you are going to walk the streets at night, you’d better know whose side you are on,’ said a familiar gruff voice behind me.

I turned to grin at the face of my milk-brother before answering, ‘I’m not on anyone’s side.’

‘Not possible in Florence,’ he said, giving me a bear hug. ‘We’d better get you out of the way before you get into trouble.’

We were soon sitting in his father’s house toasting each other with rough red wine, no better than I used to drink in Settignano. There was no sign of his father, old Lodovico, however, or any of his brothers. I looked at him with satisfaction. No one could have called my brother a handsome man, though he might have been passable if a young friend of his hadn’t broken his nose when they were just boys. But he took no account of appearances and was careless about his clothes.

All the years I knew him, my brother moved in a sort of cloud of white dust. It made me feel right at home. It was partly that he worked all day on his sculpture but mainly because he hardly ever changed his clothes.

He was looking just as closely at me.

‘Gabriele,’ he said, ‘you’ve grown. You are a man now.’

‘Not much of a one yet,’ I said. Next to him I felt like a boy.

‘But a very good-looking one,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be careful.’

I couldn’t help it; I blushed. My brother narrowed his eyes.

‘I don’t mean that high-born lady who’s been playing with you for these last weeks,’ he said. ‘That’s only to be expected. I mean men. There are a lot in Florence who would pay you to be their toy.’

This wasn’t a conversation likely to restore my composure. It was true I had been looked at by as many men as women when I was sitting in front of the cathedral, eating my bread and cheese, before my lady rescued me.

‘I have never been with a man,’ I said. ‘That is not the way my inclinations lie.’

He gave a short, barking laugh. ‘It might not be your inclinations that would be consulted,’ he said. Then he looked at me, appraising me, as if I were a block of marble. ‘Beauty like yours doesn’t last long,’ he said at last. ‘You might be tempted to make the most of it.’

‘Stop it, Angelo,’ I said. ‘I am willing to be a model for artists, if that’s what you mean, but nothing else. And I’d far rather earn my money cutting stone. That’s why I came, to see if there was any work to be had in the city.’

‘Plenty of work for a stonecutter,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you really want. But you’d better learn to protect yourself.’

He handed me a wicked-looking dagger.

‘Take this,’ he said. ‘And keep it with you always – just in case.’

Then he seemed to relax, as if I had passed some sort of test. He poured us both some more of the rough wine.

‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your mamma.’

When Angelo – which is what we called him in the family – had been born, his mother, Francesca, sent him to my mother to be nursed. Not straight away, because they had been away from Florence when the baby was born. Francesca already had a two-year-old son and I think she might have liked to carry on suckling this new babe herself but her husband had grand ideas; he thought that their remote connection with the aristocratic Canossa family meant it would be demeaning for his wife to put milk in her own child’s mouth. So off went little Angelo to my mother, who had a baby girl – my sister Giulia – about the same age.

It was a funny thing: my mother had five daughters before I was born and Angelo’s mamma had five sons before she died. It’s like that with some women. But when Signora Buonarroti breathed her last after the birth of her fifth son, Angelo was still living with us. He was only six and I don’t know what happened to his four brothers; the new baby must have needed a nurse but it wasn’t Mamma. Angelo was pining and old Lodovico, his father, was at his wits’ end, so he let him stay with us.

I say ‘us’ but I wasn’t born then. My mother claims that I was conceived the very night Francesca died. That’s why they gave me my name.

‘She left your brother, named for the archangel Michael, with us and straight away a boy leapt in my womb,’ she would say. ‘So we called you Gabriele.’

It was embarrassing. And a bit blasphemous.

But my parents had been desperate for a son after five girls. My father was a stonecutter and he hoped to have sons to follow him into the trade. As it turned out, he got just the one. And that one was born nine months after little Angelo became a permanent part of the family.

Angelo was a stonecutter too! But in a much grander way. He was a sculptor who worked in marble. He always said he’d drunk his love of stone in with my mother’s milk. And he was no archangel, in spite of his name, but he was like a brother to me and I loved him. He lived with us for another four years until his father took him back and sent him to school. My earliest memory is of Angelo drawing pictures in the earth for me with a sharpened stick.

‘Wake up, sleepyhead!’ said my brother, squeezing cold drops of water on my face from a cloth held high above me. ‘The sun and I have been awake for hours.’

I came to, spluttering. ‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘You got into soft ways at Signora de’ Buonvicini’s,’ he teased. ‘You never slept in like this in Settignano, I’ll wager.’

‘Wasn’t allowed to,’ I admitted.

‘Why did you come to Florence?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Wasn’t there enough work for you back home?’

‘Ay, enough, but only boring work,’ I said. ‘I wanted to be where you could see the cut stone turning into beautiful buildings.’

It was true. Half the reason I’d been so easily robbed that first night was because I was staring like a booby at the white, green and pink marble inlaid in the walls of the cathedral. Everyone knew in Settignano about this pattern and where the stone had come from – Carrara for the white, Prato for the green and Siena for the pink – but this was the first time I had seen it up close.

Angelo cuffed me gently round the head.

‘You’re too much of a dreamer to be a
picchiapietre
all your life,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should be a sculptor like me?’

‘I don’t think so, brother.’ I shook my head. ‘I might be a dreamer but I’m no artist.’

‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘Now eat a crust of bread and I’ll take you to see a real piece of stone.’

He wasn’t a man to spend long sprucing himself up before going out into the world in the morning so I had to hurry to keep up with him. Literally a crust to eat, after all those delicacies at my lady’s, and five minutes to splash my face with more water and drag my fingers through my hair, and then he was striding off back towards the cathedral.

I was a bit nervous about coming so close to Clarice’s palazzo again so soon after leaving it but my brother skirted up the other side of the cathedral and towards its works’ building.

He was obviously well known there, by all the greetings he got on the way in. But he merely grunted in reply or lifted a hand. He was a man with a purpose. And when he’d reached what he wanted to show me, I saw why.

It was a block of old marble lying on its side in a courtyard. It must have been nine
braccia
or so long – about the size of three men lying end to end. The surface of it had my hands itching, it was so pitted and full of holes. Someone had botched a job of turning it into something – or somebody.

‘Carrara,’ said my brother, tapping the block with his toe.

‘How old is it?’

‘It’s been lying around here nearly forty years.’

‘What was it going to be?’

‘A giant for the cathedral.’

‘Didn’t get very far, did he – whoever he was?’

My brother shrugged. I could see he wasn’t interested in whatever had happened to this block of stone in the past. The gleam in his eye told me that he was thinking only of its future.

‘You want it, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I think I can get it. They want to get rid of it.’

‘I should think so too, if they’ve been tripping over it for forty years!’

‘I’m not the only one after it, though,’ said my brother. ‘Someone else wants it as a present.’

‘A present?’

‘I’m going to charge them well for what I make of it,’ he said, ‘but it will be worth it.’

I could see that he thought this big ugly block was a challenge. I knew he was a great man now with a reputation that had travelled north from Rome but I really doubted he could make anything worth looking at out of such a monstrosity.

‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We’re going to measure it.’

By July negotiations were going on for Angelo to have the block of marble. He now had to make a model to convince the Operai del Duomo, those exacting men who oversaw the art of the cathedral, that he could really do something with it. I had never seen him so excited, but then I’d never seen him work before either. Whenever he had come to visit us at home, he had been on holiday.