The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series) (15 page)

Until
, Guid'Antonio thought,
Lorenzo is again fully convinced of the Vespucci family's loyalty to his house.

Outside in the garden, they stood together in the sun's dazzling presence, shading their eyes and blinking. “I don't think we deserve this aggravation,” Amerigo said. “What's next? A plague of locusts to cast a deeper shadow over our family?”

Guid'Antonio regarded his other nephew. “ 'Tonio, Maria's house is in poor repair. Tell Cesare to have our gardeners go there and see to the herbs, at least. But first some workmen to clean up the place. I meant to speak with Cesare myself, but I've other business at hand.”

“I'll see it's done,” Antonio said, hurrying to the gate. “Uncle Guid'Antonio, I have complete faith our fortunes will improve in every direction, now you're here. Not just for us, but for all Florence.”

Cesare, now 'Tonio. Guid'Antonio sighed, slightly smiling. “Tell me—have we dealings with a fellow named Castruccio Senso? The wine merchant who's the husband of—”

“The missing girl, Camilla Rossi da Vinci. Yes. Or we did,” Antonio said. “We broke with him over padded invoices late last year. Short, tubby, a sparse thatch of mousy brown hair.”

And he was married to a girl Lorenzo considered pretty as a poppy. “One thing more. Last Wednesday when the painting first wept—was it raining?”

“No, we had fair weather till you arrived home yesterday evening. Then it poured buckets.”

“Ha! No surprise there,” Guid'Antonio said.

Amerigo watched his brother hurry down the street. “After all this, shall we go by
Il Leone Rosso
and fortify ourselves with some wine and sausage?”

“No. Time to cut the coat according to the cloth. Past time, in fact. I want to speak with Sandro Botticelli.”

Guid'Antonio's nose prickled: pine and poplar wood, linseed oil, flour paste and glue made from the clippings of goats' muzzles, feet, sinews, and skin. Wooden shutters attached to a window looking upon the alley stood propped open. In the small bit of gray light thus provided, there loomed the faceless figure of a man attired in a loose white robe. Amerigo jumped back. “Uncle! What is
that?
”

“A wooden mannequin. For Sandro's apprentices to work by.”

“It startled me.”

“Obviously.”

Two boys sat before the white-clad figure. One boy leaned forward, his hair a thick shadow across his cheek as he watched the other lad practice the drawing of clothing with all its difficult tricks. Both youths glanced up, smiling. The two men standing before them were potential customers, wealthy, most like, given their elegant bearing and fine clothing, come to commission something from the master. Good!

A boy of about ten sat apart, gilding a picture frame with paint the same bright color as his own golden tangle of curls.
“Giorno,”
Guid'Antonio said. “Is your master home?”

“Sì.”
Turning halfway round on his stool, the boy gestured toward the rear of the shop, where a man in a loose cotton shirt sat bent over a pen-and-ink sketch with his hosed feet locked around the legs of his stool. Sandro Botticelli's hair, a rich, ginger-gold color, brushed his nape. On the floor beside his scuffed ankle boots lay a wide leather belt, cast off for comfort.

The artisan at work.

Sandro looked up, scowling. Recognition came quickly: Guid'Antonio and Amerigo Vespucci. He drew back a bit. Slowly, the color drained from his face. Brushing at his tunic, he moved toward them with what Guid'Antonio could only call trepidation.

“You've seen your new Saint Augustine,” Sandro said in a flat tone.

“No. Or at least not clearly.” Guid'Antonio cocked his head. “Why do you mention it?”

Sandro hesitated. “I thought perhaps you had noticed my—” He smiled, waving his fingers lightly in the air. “It's nothing, believe me. But now you're here.”

Questions chased through Guid'Antonio's mind. Nothing? Why was Sandro Botticelli so nervous about their presence in his workshop? They had been close neighbors and acquaintances for years. “How are you, Alessandro?” he said, beginning again.

“Fine, today. Tomorrow's another set of sleeves.” Sandro poured wine into three cups. “The Unicorn district's alive with news of your arrival. As is all Florence, I expect. After such a lengthy absence.”

Amerigo grunted. “Have people mentioned the devil's on our tail?”

“When's Florence ever quiet?”

“Never in my time,” Guid'Antonio said. “Is your family well?”

“Everyone except Mariano. My father's ill.”

“Mine, too,” Amerigo said. “So much so, he's gone to take the air in San Felice.” A bitter smile touched Amerigo's lips. “So as not to infect the entire family.”

“May God preserve him,” Sandro said, crossing himself.

But the shrewd look in Sandro's amber-colored eyes told Guid'Antonio the painter knew all about Nastagio Vespucci's forced exodus to the countryside early this morning. No doubt the entire Santa Maria Novella quarter—all Florence—knew and knew why, too, just as they knew why Piero Vespucci was chained in the bowels of the Stinche.

Guid'Antonio said, “Sandro, you've been in Ognissanti these last few months. Have you noticed any unusual activity there?”

Sandro fixed him with a wide golden stare. “For a time the
Virgin Mary of Santa Maria Impruneta
was weeping. I'm pleased to say she's not one of mine.”

Amerigo started to laugh, but sobered, coughing into his fist, when he caught Guid'Antonio's disapproving glance. “When did the tears begin?” Guid'Antonio said.

“A week ago tomorrow in the late afternoon.”

Today was Tuesday. “So last Wednesday, then.” This seemed to be the truth of it, since several people had given him the same information.

“Yes.”

“You remember well.”

“Who wouldn't?”

“Who saw them first?” Guid'Antonio said.

“A young boy—it's always children, isn't it? The truly innocent—spied them. In the next instant, people filled the church, praying and beating their breasts.” Sandro's eyes flickered, but he stopped there.

“Did you see them?”

“Of course. When I heard the commotion, I flew to Ognissanti.”

“You weren't already there working?”

Sandro shook his head. “I had an embroidery design for an altar cloth promised, and—”

“Straight around the corner to the church,” Guid'Antonio said.

“Yes.”

“What did they look like?”

Sandro gave a quick shrug and a frown. “I've little to add to the official statement I gave Palla Palmieri when he came around asking these same questions.”

Guid'Antonio's eyes narrowed. Palla had been to Botticelli and Company? Florence's chief law officer, investigating a religious matter? But then, Guid'Antonio supposed there was good reason for this, given the tears had been turned against Lorenzo. “Palla quizzed you,” he said.

“He did.” Sandro glanced impatiently toward the drawings on his pine worktable. “He said, “ ‘Yes, no, yes, no,’ then was gone like a brisk breeze down the alley in that catlike way of his.”

“What did you tell him they looked like?” Guid'Antonio said.

Sandro drew a long breath, apparently in lieu of gritting his teeth. “Like tears, Messer Guid'Antonio. Wet and glistening in the glow of countless votives. Amid the uproar, joy and grace reigned in Ognissanti that day.”

“Or mass confusion,” Amerigo said.

“When did Camilla Rossi da Vinci disappear?” Guid'Antonio said.

“The girl? Eleven days ago, on the first day of the month,” Sandro said.

“That's precise.”

“Yes.”

“
Before
the painting wept,” Guid'Antonio said.

“By several days. So what?” Sandro said.

“How did Camilla's disappearance come to be at the hands of Turks?” Beside Guid'Antonio, Amerigo stirred restlessly. This was plowed ground.

“Her old nurse witnessed the attack,” Sandro said.

The old woman again. This matched Luca Landucci's version of events surrounding the missing girl and Lorenzo's version, as well. “And people believe the nurse because?”

Sandro threw up his hands. “What reason has she to lie?”

“Money,” Amerigo said. “A bribe to mask whatever truly happened.”

“That's what I'd like to know,” Guid'Antonio said.

“Why do you dismiss the Turks so lightly?” Sandro said. “You know their history.”

“I don't dismiss them, except when people bring them to our door. Thank you for the wine, Alessandro.”

“Anytime,” Sandro said instead of: “What in hell are you really doing here?”

Guid'Antonio smiled. He had interrogated Sandro about the tears, and Sandro had answered as best he could.

“You seem weary,” Sandro said, following them to the door.

“So do you,” Guid'Antonio said. Outside, he glanced up and down the street. Toward his right, a monk hurried toward Piazza Santa Maria Novella past walls so close, the folds of the man's brown robe brushed the stones on either side.

“Uno momento, per favore, Messer Guid'Antonio.”

Guid'Antonio whirled. “Yes?”

“Necessity drags me places my pride would rather not go. I would sell my soul to work in the Pope's new chapel in Rome. You were there before going to France. Do you know whether the Holy Father plans to move forward and decorate the walls without us while the interdict is ongoing?”

Us
. Florence's most celebrated painters: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, the brothers Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo, Cosimo Rosselli, and the up-and-coming Leonardo da Vinci.

Guid'Antonio regarded Sandro thoughtfully. Sixtus IV had begun building the chapel beside the Vatican seven years ago, in 1473. Now, although the cavernous building was finished, its long inner walls remained blank, because how could the painted decorations go forward without Florence's master craftsmen there to give them places, people, faces? Unthinkable. Although not impossible, given Sixtus's monumental impatience and his determination to make a point with the interdict no matter how his new chapel suffered.

“I have no idea what Sixtus means to do,” Guid'Antonio said. “You're right, though, I was in Rome two years ago. And saw the chapel before leaving.”

“Christ's wounds.” Sandro's hand touched his breast. “You saw the blank walls?”

“I did.” In May 1478, mere weeks after Giuliano's assassination, Guid'Antonio had rushed to Rome along with ambassadors from France, Venice, and Milan, anxious to dissuade Sixtus from waging war with Florence and Lorenzo. While Guid'Antonio was there, Bartolomeo Sacchi, the Pope's Vatican librarian, had led the Pope's foreign visitors on a chapel tour, past a temporary curtain and on inside the building. There the men had skirted scaffolding and wheelbarrows, tools, and all manner of debris as Sacchi showed them the dizzyingly high vaulted ceiling—almost seventy feet up—the windows, and the soldiers' quarters above the vault: plainly, Pope Sixtus IV meant the chapel for defense as well as for housing cardinals during conclaves to elect his successors. The building had teemed with laborers, carpenters and brick masons, hammers banging, trowels slapping while rude jokes flew and the builder shouted orders and shook plaster dust from his flyaway, wild black hair.

Guid'Antonio told Sandro this, but not how uncomfortably enclosed the chapel made him feel. As if he were in a tomb. Trapped, like the little sparrow desperately flapping its wings in Ognissanti yesterday evening. His mission to Rome had been short-lived: plainly, Sixtus IV and Girolamo Riario were bent on continuing their pursuit of Lorenzo.

And so after four months, Guid'Antonio had departed the Eternal City, turning his back on the crumbling old Coliseum and the broken Greek and Roman statues and urns jutting up from the surrounding fields. Eventually, the scaffolding had been removed from the chapel some people were calling the Sistine, after Sixtus, who had commissioned it, but the inner walls remained as blank today as they had been the afternoon the laborers packed up their tools and walked to the nearest tavern for wine and bowls of stewed oxtail soup.

“Only the devil Girolamo Riario is privy to the Holy Father's thoughts on the chapel or any other score,” Guid'Antonio said, standing in Sandro's workshop doorway.

The artist gestured with his hand, hit the top of the stone door frame, and swore. The raven scavenging for crumbs in the alley cawed, flying up between the sides of the buildings, toward freedom and the full light of day. “I may as well forget going to Rome and throw myself in the Arno! Who knows how long Girolamo Riario will set his uncle against us?”

Guid'Antonio grunted. He wanted the Florentines at work in the Pope's chapel as much as any other man. After all, the place was for the ages. “Don't jump yet, Sandro. Sixtus has spent far too much time, effort, and money to settle for anything less than the best.”

“And if he's spent all his patience, too? He'll have the walls done soon, yet we still have this . . . this other wall standing like a mountain between us and the Vatican.”

Guid'Antonio gazed steadily at Sandro's frowning face. “A lot of people have suffered.”

“Don't tell me. I know!” Sandro jerked his thumb back toward the shop. “Lest something changes soon, we'll all be eating stone soup.”

Lorenzo and the war. Lorenzo and the Pope. Pope Sixtus IV held a treasure trove of high cards, even the chapel in Rome. No Tuscan craftsmen would be called there while the Pope battled Florence. Not before Lorenzo rode south and apologized for his—what? Insolence? More for his very presence on God's soil. And the only way
that
was going to happen was over Guid'Antonio's dead body, stone soup, or no.

Sandro drew air into his chest. “In the meanwhile, thank God for the new contract I've signed with Brother Giorgio.”

Guid'Antonio glanced at Amerigo, whose eyes immediately locked on the alley's swath of narrow damp ground. “What new contract?” he said.

Amerigo scratched his cheek as if he had never experienced such an itch. “Likely, he means the portrait Uncle Giorgio recently commissioned.”

“Of whom?” Guid'Antonio said.

“Me.” Amerigo rocked back on the heels of his boots, grimacing. “It wasn't my idea.”