Wolves in Winter (16 page)

‘—the French.’

‘Yes, and I thought my work would be destroyed.’

‘Margherita. Her name was Margherita. She was good to me. But what she did, it was just cunning, cunning and a little knowledge of herbs, nothing more. She had no learning. Piero locked
her up, you know. She didn’t deserve that, either.’

‘Indeed. But she saw in you what your father had seen.’

He was speaking in riddles, round and round we went.

‘Seen what, Maestro? Please be plain, seen what?’

‘It is delicate.’

I looked at the hoe, my foolish weapon, and wondered if I would have to use it after all.

‘You might be a source, Mora. A key.’

I was losing my composure again.

‘Maestro, if you do not speak plain I swear I shall beat you until your old bones rattle. Sir.’

Samuel Benito, Toledo bookseller, had advertised around Europe that his daughter was a freak, a changeling true, a monster. A between-thing, neither male nor female; hard and smooth where I
should be soft and hollow; maleficent; cursed indeed. And when they came for him, the soldiers of the Inquisition, he calculated quickly that his conjuring trick would scare them off. But dressing
me as he did also conveyed another meaning – one that he hoped would allow me to be found. That, and my dowry of books, would explain who I was and make me precious indeed to the scholar who
was lucky enough to get me.

That scribbled pamphlet I had seen in Florence, which I thought was sensation, a crude thrill for ignorant people, was full of signs for those like Maestro Ficino who knew how to read it. The
flowers in my hair? The
eiresione
, the hermaphrodite’s crown of flowers. The cochineal on my palms? The blood which one spilled in fallow fields when girls gave up their maidenheads on
Midsummer’s Eve, a sacrifice to make the soil fruitful, in the old way. The pose he had me take, staggering there in the window place, arms outstretched? The alembic, the contrary cup of the
alchemists, the source of the Philosopher’s Stone. Such an elegant key, my clever father had prepared, so learned, so witty. So Maestro Ficino had seen the drawing and read the letters, sent
out the merchants stocked with Medici money to bring back his prize and I wished to every God I had ever heard named that I had stopped my mouth and stayed hidden in the kitchens.

I dropped the hoe so it clattered on the floor. My master watched me, and in his avid eyes I saw that he believed it. And I thought it might be true.

I thought of the crowd in the Zocodover, the startled maid.
Maligno
.

I thought of the hammam at Adara’s house, of her hands passing over me, caressing, appraising. Of the fat old woman, who thought she might turn a fine profit from my strangeness.
Mind
and be nice to the gentleman.

I thought of my three enemies in the palazzo, how they had snatched off my chemise to stare and sneer.

I thought of my reflection in Donna Alfonsina’s mirror.

I thought of Margherita.
Won’t have the boys after you, will you?
And Cecco’s sweet little brothers.
Are you a witch?

And then I made myself think of what I touched when I washed or squatted over the pot. A nubble of skin like a bean in the place between my legs. Underneath, all smoothness.
People fear what
they do not understand.
I had thought myself cursed, and I had thought right.

I wrapped my arms around my shoulders to stop the shaking, feeling the delicate bones beneath my linen, like folded wings. I could not cry. The troupe had been right, too. I belonged with them,
a curiosity like Addio, a deformed thing like poor stumping Casinus.

‘They should have killed me. They should have drowned me at birth like a kitten,’ I spat.

‘They would have done once, in Greece,’ said my master placidly.

‘The dreams I have?’

‘A sign, a sign of what you might become.’

‘Shall I grow a beard then, and you can show me at the fair for a florin?’

‘Do not speak so lightly. It is a precious thing, a great thing. Come, sit. I will try to tell you.’

I could not listen. I jumped up and ran from the library, out across the grounds and into the woods. I ran until my breath scraped my lungs and my legs shook, stumbling and falling, heedless of
the thorns and the goring branches that awaited my eyes. I listened for that fluid sliding rhythm of the ground beneath me, to run until I was lost in it and beyond pain. But I staggered clumsily,
ripping at a torn trunk as it came up to meet me, slicing a deep cut in my palm. I paused and licked at it and rubbed my blood over my face. Then I sank down against a trunk and howled until my
crying seemed a thing apart from me, a thing of the darkness of the forest, throbbing through ferny hollows and treetops. Gasping and whining until I came back to myself, panting and sore, I
knuckled my eyes and they filled with dirt.

I would never marry, even if I could find a man willing to bed something as ugly as me. I would never have my monthly courses. I would never have a husband of my own, nor feel the plump,
satisfying weight of a babe in my lap. If Cecco had known what his lips touched, he would have retched. I was a foul, unclean thing. I thought of my little cabinet of herbs, and how I believed I
might make cures and be useful, and live quietly. I felt empty, scraped out inside with the loss of something I had never yet known. I saw now why my father had tried to teach me of the northmen,
and their magic. Had he not told me that the
seid
was the gift of between-ones, those who slipped like shadows between the spaces of the world?
Mooncalf
, Margherita had called me,
mermaid
. Both things and not-thing. Nothing.

*

I went back, of course. I went back because I had nowhere else to go and winter was coming on and it was Careggi or starve in the forest. No one would ever want me now except
Maestro Ficino, who had not even noticed my absence. I sliced off my hair with a kitchen knife, and stitched myself a clumsy shirt from a sheet. So, when Giovanni de Medici came, he found the old
scholar and his boy slave, his apprentice. Just as Cecco had been. Ser Giovanni brought house servants and grooms and horses, and looked to set himself up as master at Careggi, since there was none
other to challenge him.

Piero de Medici was fled from Florence, an outlaw with a ransom of four thousand ducats on his head. Savonarola, the monk of San Marco, claimed the French king as the instrument of God’s
justice, come across the mountains, just as he had predicted; to crush vice and exalt virtue, make straight all that was crooked, renew the old and reform all that was deformed. Charles installed
himself in Piero’s emptied palace and demanded one hundred and fifty thousand ducats as the price of the city’s safety. If the Florentines did not pay, he proclaimed, he would sound his
trumpets and put the city to the sword. The Florentines, who always cared more for gold than for honour, refused him. If he would sound his trumpets, they declared, they would ring their bells
– and their defiance was successful, for the king turned his army on to Rome. With their money secured, they were willing to let Savonarola have a care for their virtue, and make him a
greater tyrant than ever Piero had dreamed of being.

I feared that some of the mouths who travelled with Ser Giovanni might recognise me from the palazzo, but all had been so turned about since Piero’s fall that none of them even thought on
me. The talk was all of Savonarola, who had decreed that Florence must fast for its sins, and of those children of his I had seen parading through the streets. The ‘Blessed Bands’ they
were called. They were hollow-eyed now with hunger, gathering books and pictures and all that had made Florence gracious and learned. The Dominicans rewarded them for spying on their own parents,
reporting a game at cards for a few coins here, a treasured length of lace locked up in a marriage chest there. They carried olive branches and red painted crucifixes around the Signoria and, much
to Maestro Ficino’s disgust, it was said that angels had come among the people, to redeem them and bring them back to God.

‘He called upon the people to put to death anyone who called for the restoration of my family,’ Ser Giovanni explained. ‘The palle are gone from every house in the city. Even
my own.’ He had the decency to look ashamed. ‘We are called Popolano, now.’

‘There are those who try to stand against him,’ he went on. ‘They throw stones at the bands and make a racket when he goes out to preach, but he is loved by many. They say that
he will make Florence a new Jerusalem.’

There was a Venetian merchant who had offered a fortune for certain pictures; they made an effigy of him and set it atop a tower of scent bottles and gowns, fans, jewellery, looking glasses,
velvet bed canopies and silk stockings, and fired it all. They burned words too, poems and plays and philosophy, anything that might distract the people from their duty to God or let them dream a
while on something rare and beautiful.

‘They seek magic books, Maestro. Books are silent heretics, they say.’

My master put his head in his hands and groaned. I thought of Cecco, of how proud he had been that ignorance and superstition would never govern in Florence. At least he had not lived to see his
beliefs in flames.

‘And what shall you do, sir?’ asked my master carefully.

‘The city grows hungry. They will need grain, and they will pay for it. I shall stay here and keep quiet and see about it, when the time comes. I am writing to the Countess of Forli, who
has lands in the Romagna, great estates of wheat. I think she will be willing to sell.’

A silence fell. There was a fire burning in the library now, and wine and fruit on the table.

‘And I, sir? As you see, it is more urgent than ever now that I continue with my researches.’

‘You are welcome to stay as long as you wish, Maestro. I know of the high regard in which my uncle the great Lorenzo held you. I should be honoured if you would remain here at
Careggi.’

So after all that had happened, it seemed that very little had changed. I spent each day with my master, shut up with the books, while the Duke of Milan turned his coat again and leagued with
the Pope and the Venetians to drive the French out of Italy. Thus I heard the name Borgia for the first time. Borgia, the Spanish Pope. They said he had bought the papacy with a mule train of
silver. They said he was debauched, a murderer. They said he knew the old arts, the black arts, that each night four or five men, bishops and prelates and others too, were found washed up in the
river of Rome, and that no one dared speak for fear of poison. For all that he was a Catalan, the Pope claimed that he loved Italy, and would surrender his tiara rather than bow to the French king.
Charles’s army persuaded him otherwise, and that winter the gates of Rome were opened to them.

So skilful was this Pope, so subtle and beguiling, that Charles rode on to Naples believing that he would receive its crown from the Pope’s own hands. Yet while he played the gallant with
a whole chapbook of beautiful whores, and his men bit the very fingers from the women of the city just to have their rings, the Pope was scheming against him. By the summer Charles was chased out
of Italy like a journeying dog, biting first one and then another, all his looted treasures left behind and his great army laid about with the pox.

Careggi seemed enclosed, marooned beyond the currents that were reshaping Italy. Only Maestro Ficino’s correspondents brought us news of what was happening beyond the hills. In truth,
though, my master cared very little for the tides that washed these armies up and down the peninsula. He cared little for the Pope and his Holy League or the Duke of Milan. His thoughts were all
for me. He had me read to him from his own tracts on alchemy, and the Philosopher’s Stone. I had heard of this from the mountebanks who thronged the street corners of Florence before the
coming of the French, and I wondered why my master should concern himself with such things. He explained that this was no vulgar search for gold. He was not chasing after magical dreams of wealth.
Rather, he sought a heavenly and spiritual substance, which could transcend nature itself and bring all things to their best, most perfect state. It was no chimerical phantasy, he said, but a sober
possibility of Nature. It was not a stone, quite. Its appearance was a powder, almost impalpable to the touch, sweet tasting and fragrant, dry yet unctuous, capable of tinging a plate of metal. It
was named ‘stone’ because its nature was so fixed as to resist fire.

‘It is the father of all miracles, Mora, combining all the elements in such a manner that none will dominate, but rather produce a
fifth essence
, a glorious, spiritual gold. That is
what we are seeking. That is why I needed
you
.’

His belief in it was so fervent that I could not help but be convinced. He was a great scholar and I knew so little. He thought that I had been brought to him by design, to help him; and I was
so dull and sorrowful and disliked myself so for the twisted thing he had shown me I was, that it seemed my duty to do so. What other purpose could there be for me?

He talked and talked, and I tried to listen, though often it bored me and my mind would drift away. More often, though, it frightened and disgusted me. He did not mean to be unkind, my master.
Indeed I think he even felt affection for me, so much as he could feel it for anything that was not written down in a book. But day after day, as he theorised and consulted his charts, I felt like
a surgeon’s specimen, pinned down to be sliced apart and the pieces served up for my master to scrutinise.

It would take many, many years, he said.

I would grow old at Careggi, I thought. Imprisoned by walls of paper, as from the first, in that drawing of the flaming child in Toledo.

‘“
Prima materies
,”,’ he read to me, ‘“corresponding to the synthesis of heaven and earth, to the spirit and the body, it contains all metals and all
colours and engenders itself . . . the Philosopher’s Stone, which is identified with it, is represented by a crowned Hermaphrodite.”’