Wolves in Winter (12 page)

Gingilassi
. It was a Florentine word, a word I liked. It meant to waste time, hang about doing nothing, and that was my favourite thing to do, to wander about with Cecco when we were
released from the
scrittoio
.

‘You wait,’ he was saying one evening, ‘Ser Piero will see for those Frenchies. They’ll never care to come against a Medici.’

Piero was hesitating against the offers from Milan, for Florence was presently allied with Naples. The whole peninsula, Cecco said, was waiting to see which way the Pope would turn. Cecco puffed
out his chest the way he always did when he said the Medici name.

‘You’re always creeping up to him.’

He elbowed me cheerfully in my skinny ribs.

‘Ow! You are too!’

We were walking quickly, to keep off the cold, we had come a long way up the city, near to the church of San Marco.

‘I’m proud of it. Palle forever!’ he said.

‘What are you saying then?’

We turned to see who had spoken. There were a group of them, standing about in a doorway. Boys a little older than Cecco, scrawny and tough-looking. Hungry-looking.

‘I said, palle,’ Cecco repeated, ‘and proud of it. What’s it to you then?’

I patted his shoulder. ‘Cecco, it’s late, I think we should go home.’

‘Shut up.’

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way they eyed us, the fineness of our Medici clothes. Their jerkins were tatty and they had no boots. We were a long way from the Medici
gonfalone
, in this part of town.

‘Come away.’

I tried to hurry him, but as we passed before them a stone caught Cecco’s back. Another and another.

‘Freedom, that’s what
we’re
for. We’re no Medici arse lickers.’

Cecco tried to keep walking, but one of them came up behind him and hooked his foot about his leg so he fell. I went to help him, my hood slipped off my hair.

‘It’s her. The witch! Ficino’s witch!’

They were around us now, pushing us tight together. I began to be afraid.

‘We’ve heard about you. There’s witchcraft going on in the palazzo.’

I looked about frantically, hoping that one of the
Oresta
, the magistrates who kept order in the streets at night, might be passing, but there was no one. They made the sign of the
malocchio
, the evil eye, pointing their fingers at us. I thought quickly, there was no way we could fight them. I put my head up and gave them my eyes straight.

‘I’ll tell my master of you,’ I said. ‘And do you know what will happen?’

They were silent, just boys after all.

‘If I say so, he’ll fetch out a fresh corpse from the graveyard at Fiesole. And it will walk down through the streets at night, and it will find you.’ Quick as a cat, I shot
out my hand and grabbed the hair of the nearest one, twisting a clump of it away in my hand so he screamed. ‘It will follow the thread to you, like this,’ – I drew out a hair
between my fingers – ‘and you’ll wake in the night and its rotting breath will be in your face and then it will sink its teeth into you, for they are hungry, the dead. And you can
scream and yell all you like,’ – I kicked out contemptuously at the boy who hunched over beside me – ‘but no one will hear you, for the dead are silent. And they’ll
find you in the morning, all ready for the grave. Shall I tell my master, then?’

They were moving away from us now. It was almost too easy.

‘Yes,’ shouted Cecco, ‘that’s how they do things in Toledo.’

‘Shut up, you’ll spoil it.’

I stared them down until they reached the corner, then I stretched out my fingers and hissed at them, and they scattered like pigeons. Cecco was staring at me, astonished, even a little
fearful.

‘Is it true, Mora? That was really good.’

‘
Scemo
. Of course not. I had them, though, didn’t I?’

We ran home, laughing all the way, our good boots loud on the cobbles.

*

That winter, the wolves came to Florence. They ran low through the shuttered gunnels, hunted, starving. At first, they took the lonely ones, the poor creatures who hunched in
rags in doorways and ditches, then they grew bold and slid into houses, nosing their prey through cellars and stairwells, so that the last sight a wakened sleeper saw was the glow of their amber
eyes in the darkness. I dreamed them, I dreamed them all. I dreamed the she-wolf who howled at old Lorenzo’s dying. She came to my chamber but I was not afraid, for she knew me as one of her
own. Wish, desire. She was my wolf-mother. I dreamed I heard the thump of their hungering blood, and smiled; for I had the light of the forests in me, and the black man watched over me. They sang
me to sleep, my sweet shadows, and I placed no light in my window, as poor fearful snivellers did. I dreamed them and I knew I should not be harmed.

*

So the ambassadors went back and forth, and Piero prevaricated, and in Milan Lodovico Il Moro declared for France. In exchange for the confirmation of his ducal coronet, he
would send his soldiers down the spine of Italy and take Naples for Charles, the crook-backed king of the French. And Piero commissioned a snow statue in the
cortile
from a young man named
Buonarotti. A whimsical conceit of a thing, as though to show that the Medici had no need of marble to make their greatness known. To squander a winter’s worth of bread on a caprice was his
response to the sword that Savonarola dangled over Florence. It was the prior of Santo Spirito, they said, who had taught the young sculptor his anatomy. Nor did they miss the defiance of the
gesture – that Piero would take the Dominicans’ artist and put him to work on a trifle.

But Buonarotti surprised him. Perhaps Piero thought that his protégé was malleable, that he would produce something curious and flattering and pretty. For a whole day the slaves
shovelled snow in the courtyard, compacting it into a huge block with their spades, and the boy, who could not have been more than twenty, had them build a series of shelves around it, with torches
in the brackets so that he could work by night. We slept that evening to the faint scrape of his chisel and in the morning it was there. St Michael the Archangel, Michelangelo, stooping to cut the
throat of the writhing serpent grasped in the clutch of his arm, the straining power of his torso an affront to Piero’s airy dismissal of the spirit abroad in the city.

This is might, it seemed to say, this the lock which fate will hold you in, and you can try to wriggle free, but you will never escape.

Maestro Ficino shuffled down in his tatty robe to gawp with the rest of the household, not even minding his bare feet, clucking and muttering at what his master would think. But Piero could not
allow himself to betray any emotion but pleasure as his servants drew back to let him see the marvel, and the young man beside it, his face flushed with cold and triumph after his long
night’s work. It stood there then, this wondrous thing, a reproach to Piero’s attempted insouciance, until the thaw reduced it to a dripping, shapeless lump; but by then Piero had other
matters to contend with than the conceit of a cheeky sculptor.

The Florentines believed that spirits could be imprisoned in statues, that their makers could cast ill wishing into the stone, and though the statue was gone by spring it seemed that after all,
Savonarola’s predictions would come out. He had cast himself as the avenging angel of Florence, and the Medici power was trickling away in the meltwater of the Alps.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
T THE END OF HOLY WEEK, THERE WAS TO BE A BALL
at the palazzo. First came the ceremony of the carriage, which Cecco rushed
me to Mass to see. All the fires in the city had been extinguished since Good Friday, and now the flame in the Baptistery would be relit with the spark of the stone chips from the Holy Sepulchre
itself, brought to Florence by the first man to scale the walls of Jerusalem. The crowd was so thick that Cecco hoisted me on his shoulders so that I should not miss the spectacle as a curious
mechanical dove was placed in an iron war chariot, of the ancient Florentine design. This year, defiantly, Piero had ordered that the chariot be filled with gunpowder. The square was quite silent
as the orange spark hissed along the fuse, everyone waiting to see if the spark would take, which would promise a good harvest after this cruellest of winters. For a moment there was a crackle as
the flame caught, and then I was thrown to the ground as Cecco lost his footing and stumbled, shoved backwards by the surge of the crowd away from the deafening blast. I scrabbled at a cloak to tug
myself to my feet, in time to put back my head and see the grey spring sky come alive with a volcano of colour, my ears ringing with the delighted roars of the crowd. Cecco was grinning, a smudge
of bluish powder on his cheek.

‘Did you see, Mora, did you see it? Isn’t it wonderful!’

I smiled back, more pleased by his pleasure than my own.

‘And see, I’ll dance with you later, too. We’ll dance in the spring, eh?’

As we walked up the Via Larga, Cecco took my hand. We had to push our way through the gate; it was so busy with carts delivering provisions, a troupe of splendidly raggedy tumblers, and three
sheep being driven complainingly to their doom. I remembered Margherita’s tumblers, wondering where their travels had taken them, if they had struggled through another lean season. I was
lucky, I thought then. After all I had endured, I had come safe to this place, to this city of marvels, I would see a ball, and warm in my own was the palm of my friend.

Attentive to the complaints in the city, Piero had declared that the spring ball would be an open affair. Any Florentine who could muster a decent costume should be admitted. Disgusted, Donna
Alfonsina departed for the country with her children and women, as soon as she had heard the Easter Mass – which was, perhaps, Piero’s true intention. I had never been taught to dance,
I should make a fool of myself if I tried, but all the same, as I washed my face in rosemary water in my attic room, with the sounds of the palazzo preparing itself beneath, I couldn’t help
but feel thrilled, like any girl, like a
real
girl. My red dress, I admitted ruefully, was much too short and shabby, but I had another cut-down gown, in dark blue, and with my hair hidden
under a white linen cloth I thought I might look, if not well, at least not shaming.

I went down early, by the servants’ way, for though Piero was keen to show himself a man of the people, the great staircase was of course reserved for the grandest guests. The
cortile
had been tented over in yellow silk, which made a wonderful light as the torches picked up its warmth under the dimming night sky, and tables ran along each side, displaying the
subtleties over which the convents and confectioners of Florence had laboured for weeks. Here was the church of San Lorenzo, the Medici church, reproduced in gold-figured marchpane and here a green
sugar-meadow filled with tiny meringue statues. Here a tower of caramelised virtue, holding fast against a company of tiny knights, their costumes as bright and intricate as those who rode the
walls of Piero’s chamber. And here a mountain range, in the coal sugar eaten at Epiphany, with a column of scarlet soldiers winding up it only to fall into a ravine where a group of plum-cake
lions already held the first of their victims in cochineal jaws. The French. This was Piero’s solution then: gaiety and beauty and splendour should drive them out. As I looked, the familiar
cold tingle of my dreams stole across me.

*

Night. I stand wrapped in a cloak, waiting by the window of a huge room. The darkness smudges the plasterwork mouldings, so that this space, which has been all made of
playful light, seems menacing, more like an ancient fortress than this perfect palazzo, so high and delicate that its pale stones might have been wrought for a fairy city. At the table, upon which
a single candle flickers in its tall silver holder, sits the man in black. As ever, his face is masked, but I can make out the power in the breadth of his shoulders beneath his velvet cloak. His
wrist is delicate, elegant in a black leather gauntlet as he moves his hand to summon forward the two men who wait at the end of the hall. When they speak, I know by their voices that they are
Florentines; I can hear the golden Italian of Tuscany in their voices. The man’s voice is low, its quietness containing great anger, or perhaps a simulation of anger.

‘I am not pleased with your government. How can I trust you, how can I be sure you will not attack me? You must change your government and pledge to support me – for I have no
intention of letting this state of affairs continue.’

The older of the two Florentines answers him. ‘Florence has the government it deserves, and no other power throughout Italy keeps better faith with its people.’

The other adds that Florence has the protection of the King of France. The king has ruled that no incursions be made into their territory, they await six thousand men.

‘I know better than you what the French king has in mind,’ says the masked man. ‘If you rely on France to defend you, I suggest you will find yourselves
deceived.’

The candleflame glints on a huge ring forced over one of the leather clad fingers: a ruby stone, its dark depths drawing the light. I have seen this jewel . . .

*

‘Mora!’ Cecco was dragging at my sleeve. ‘What are you doing, mooning here? You look half-asleep! Come on.’

He pulled me urgently through the crowd, whispering the identities of those he recognised. At the loggia we had to stand back against the wall, almost drowned in a lake of crimson silk skirt as
a party of ladies made their way towards the staircase. At their head was a beauty who knew it, nothing of the customary Florentine modesty in her countenance, her head imperious on a long, slender
white neck roped around with black pearls, pearls the colour of her huge plush-lashed grey eyes.

‘D’you see her,’ hissed Cecco gleefully.

‘The dark haired one with the pearls?’

‘Donna Alba. She’s Piero’s mistress.’