Wolves in Winter (33 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

V
ALENTINO WAS RIGHT. IT WAS FINISHED. FINISHED
for the man in black, for the Countess, for me. The opiate smoothed away the
pain, fractured the sunlight around me, so all I could think of was the tread of my feet, one after the other. It should not be long. I had seen the streets of the Holy City. The drug bound my head
in the silken sack, the dark water waited for me. So many others waited in the rolling shroud of the Tiber, it would not be long. I walked and walked. I floated past them all with my white hair and
ice eyes and my mermaid’s treasure, the thieves and cutpurses and beggars, the starveling street rats, the poxed and pleading whores, yet not one of them came to do me harm. They stared and
whispered, made horns of their fingers to warn me off, shrank from my passing. The poppy was sweet and warm in my veins, my tongue sought the traces of Valentino’s skin. For the first time in
all my scrabbling, hiding life, I walked with my head held high, displaying a lifetime of unimaginable wealth for all Rome to see, yet I stayed untouchable.

I walked until the frail spring sunshine died behind the crumbling heap of the basilica. I circled the Castello, thinking of my lady there, so that the pain came on me again, as though my
swelling heart needed to burst from my breast. The waning trance of the drug spun me westwards to the rosy glow of the sky, I thought I saw his jewel burning there and reached out for it like a mad
thing, that I might bring him back, for I was his creature now, bound like a dog in his gift, fit only for the cruelties and treachery of my master. Maimed, crooked thing that I was, I had often
wished that my life would be done, but never had I yearned for it as now. I would see my papa again, he would be waiting for me with my mother, I had only to sink through the black mud of the river
and they would be there, swathed in drifts of almond blossom, she would hold me tight against her and her love would be safe, for was she not already dead? Only to the dead could I do no harm. The
pain that ailed me so returned then, deep and nauseating within me, I staggered with it and fell to the oozing ground. Something gripped me from behind, pulling me up by the flesh at my nape like a
drowned kitten, hands searched at my neck, feeling for the collar. I laughed with pleasure. It was come. I was not afraid. I would forgive him, I would look him in the eyes and forgive my
deliverer. I could barely turn my head in his grip but I twisted until I might catch his face, but saw only a knife’s blade, the supple sheen of it alight with the last of the sunset,
dazzling me. It was finished. I closed my eyes and waited for the crystal streams of my Toledo river to open their radiant arms.

*

I dream I am in the palazzo. The beautiful boy is gone from the cortile, the walnut intarsia of the benches in the loggia is dusty and scarred. My feet are loud on the
cracked marble, I look down and see a pair of clogs beneath the hem of my woollen servant’s dress. The heavy shoes clatter as I mount the staircase. My master’s scrittoio is wrecked,
the walls charred, the cabinets smashed and tumbled. I pass on. The huge fireplace in the sala is cold, the yellow silk cushions of the antecamera are hacked and moulding, oozing their down
noiselessly to the wine-soaked floor. I am looking for something, what? All the luminous treasures of this house are dulled and vanished, buried beneath Florence like the weapons of some ancient
sleeping giant. I turn towards the chapel. The magi stare solemnly still from the walls, familiar, but the chalices and furnishings are gone. A single candle burns on the altar, its light falling
on the white headcloth of a woman who kneels before a simple silver crucifix, her plain dress dark against the linen. She turns. My lady, Caterina. Her face is gentle, she smiles.

‘Good Mora. You are come.’

Something heavy lies in my palm. I have been carrying what I sought all along. I step towards her and open my hand. There it lies, the Riario ruby, the crimson flame at its heart streaming
over my skin in the glow of the candle, staining it, blood-coloured. I hold out my hand, she reaches for it.

*

‘She stirs.’

‘Mora, Mora. Can you hear us?’

‘Do not be afraid. You are safe.’

‘Mora!’

There was a cloth at my lips, I felt a trickle of warm wine in my cracked mouth. My hands moved to my throat – I had become a Florentine true, it seemed – but there were only my bare
bones.

‘It is safe. See, we have it here for you.’ A glitter of green and gold before my eyes. My eyes were open, so I was not dead. I was lying in the wagon, wrapped in something warm, a
little brazier of coals glowed at my feet. I sought about for the pain, but found it gone. Annunziata’s face wavered into sight, I tried to smile and lift myself up, but there was something
wadded between my legs and I flinched.

‘I am hurt?’

‘No, Mora. We came to find you. There was news – of the lady Caterina and how she was sent to Sant’Angelo to be tried for a witch, and we feared for you, so the men went out to
search, and they brought you here, to us.’

‘I’m bleeding.’

Her eyes dipped, I could almost feel the heat from her cheeks.

‘You were ill. When they brought you back you were too sick to walk and we washed you and saw what it was. Forgive us, Mora. We cut you. Immaculata did it. She boiled the knife in wine and
she cut you, to let out the blood. But you will be well, now. You will grow accustomed to it.’

The colour deepened in her cheeks. She was plumper, and as she moved in the light of the coals I could see the new mound of her belly shift beneath her gown. I pushed my hand beneath the blanket
and felt for the new tender place they had made in me. When I brought my finger to my lips it was bright and streaming.

‘I don’t understand. Thank you for your goodness, but I do not understand.’

‘It happens like that, sometimes. Old Margherita in Florence helped a girl in this way, she told us of it. The thing, the part that keeps a woman a maid, was grown too strong, that is all.
Like a lock. It can be mended, if it is done kindly, but if not the black blood builds, it is very dangerous. We feared to lose you.’

‘It is what I wished.’

If I had found her, that misted day in Florence. Margherita might have made me a woman after all. My poor papa had been wrong, so very wrong, and Maestro Ficino too. It was too much. I lay back
and watched the ribs of the wagon, the canvas between them bucking a little in the wind outside.

‘Sleep again now, you will be stronger.’

‘Take it, the collar,’ I asked her. ‘The men will know how to break up the stones. Please to take one of them to Trastevere, and ask for the family of a Jew named Moise. If
they can find someone, give them a stone. And take another. Buy meat, wine, anything you wish. We will have a feast.’

Her quiet face was all concern, she thought me raving.

‘We will have a feast, to honour my old master Ficino. A wedding feast, for you and your babe, and we will take a cup of wine and spill it.’ I giggled. ‘To Hymen.’

The girls whispered amongst themselves. There was something delighting them, something more than the prospect of a party.

‘She is still weak,’ I heard.

‘The shock might be too much for her.’

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What could shock me?’

Annunziata and Immaculata shrugged, their faces a mixture of anxiety and glee. Then the curtain of the wagon was pulled aside and a face peered in, a face covered by a tumbling mass of bronze
hair, the skin as warm and speckled as a new brown egg.

Cecco.

Then I realized that I was dead, after all. I didn’t mind it. I thought I would go back to sleep, and closed my eyes, laughing. I was glad to be dead. In fact, I was so happy that my last
thought wondered if the dead could run mad.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘H
OW DID YOU FIND ME?
’

We were propped on the stoop of the wagon, cosy in a blanket and the first lemony sunbeams of the Roman spring. I was still too weak to walk more than a few steps, when I tried the pain still
sliced at me, but the taint of the poppy had bled out and I knew I should get well. I could not stop looking at him, it was all I could do to stop myself reaching out to touch his face, over and
over. He had not been killed. I had seen what I wanted to see, what something in me thought I deserved to see. But he had been badly injured, so badly he had lain ill a whole year. There was a
hollow in his skull that fitted my thumb. That at least I could ask to touch, nestled under the thick cap of his hair.

‘I tried to find you, as soon as I was well. I thought you would write to me.’

I remembered the letter of condolence Maestro Ficino had asked me to finish, which I could not bear to touch. I had moved my room at Careggi when the roof began to leak, it was perhaps still
there, a soaked lump that could have saved me so much suffering, though I could not care about it now. It had taken a long time for Cecco to learn that Maestro Ficino was at Careggi, his father was
afraid that Medici servants would be victimised and had taken his family to relatives at Pistoia.

‘And then, for a while, I thought
you
were dead.’

His father had returned to the palazzo to look for me, that first awful day. Some of the Medici slaves had been killed, one of them a fair haired girl. I thought on my trio of enemies, and was
sad for whichever of them had not deserved to die that way. Then Cecco heard that Ser Giovanni was returned, and was dealing grain for the Medici under the name of Popolano. He had heard the
rumours of witchcraft at the villa and knew it could only mean that I lived. Eventually he walked all the way to Careggi, sleeping in hedges.

‘For a while, my poor father had nothing. I hated to burden him.’

When he arrived, he found me gone to Forli, and wrote to me there, but by then the plague had come, and no correspondence was permitted into the town.

‘I tried again, I wrote, but the French were on the move, it was chaos. Nowhere seemed safe, the roads were jammed with people leaving. Ser Giovanni was dead . . .’

‘He was a good man, you know,’ I said. ‘Good enough. What happened in Florence was not his fault.’

And then he heard of the siege of Ravaldino, and feared again for my life. He had stayed at Careggi, doing his best to take care of our old master, who was frail and forgetful now. Maestro
Ficino told him of the troupe, of our own extraordinary escape from Florence, and when Cecco decided to follow me down to Forli after it fell, to try for news, he had come upon them on the road and
recognised them.

‘So you were there? That night on the road, with the wolf?’

‘I hadn’t mentioned you then. I wasn’t sure I could trust them, there were so many rumours of poisoning, and unholy goings on. Then they found you on the road and I tried to
get close, I was desperate, but there were guards around you all the time. I came on after you to Rome, I thought I could find you, we asked about you and the Countess all over the city.’

I didn’t want to speak about Caterina. There would be time for that, one day. I wanted this happiness to last a little longer.

‘So why did you follow me?’ I was not flirting. I was fearful of his answer.

He looked at me. He was a man now, not a boy, and I had been right. He had grown up handsome. His hair was bronze, not carroty, his shoulders had widened, his skin was clear and tanned from the
months of travel. It darkened, blood flushing up into his cheeks.

‘Maybe I like trouble.’

We both looked at the ground. My throat felt as though I had swallowed a melon.

‘Here, I brought you something – I’ve had them all this time. My father found them.’

He bounded away and returned with a rolled flour sack. He tipped out my old doll and a bundle of red cloth into my lap. I unfolded my dress and turned it in my hands, looking for the place where
my heart had lain.

‘I brought them,’ he said again. ‘You seemed keen on them.’

‘See this, Cecco?’ I asked softly. ‘This is my name.’

They were the only things I had ever truly owned, I thought. A broken doll and a child’s worn dress. Those, and a ready fortune in emeralds.

*

The twins went into the city as I asked and found a goldsmith who did not ask questions. They brought me back a leather pouch of stones, and the clasp with the Sforza wyvern on
a plain cord, which now I wore about my neck. I wanted to give them as many as they would take – there was money there to buy them a palace apiece if they cared for it, but they settled on
just three. One for now for new clothes and shoes for the horses and a better wagon and provisions, one to keep if times went hard and one for the child, that when it was grown it might be whatever
it wanted in this world that money could buy. Johannes the blind musician was the father of Annunziata’s babe. He had been made in my master’s sign, Aquarius, in the coldest month of
the year, when I had thought myself a prisoner in Valentino’s rooms at Forli. At first it seemed sad to me that Johannes should never look upon her lovely face, or gaze into the new eyes of
his child, then I thought on how lucky Annunziata was to have someone who loved her for what she was, for whom her beauty would never fade, for whom the sound of her voice and the touch of her
hands were sufficient.

I lay another month with the bleeding, mostly in the darkness of the wagon. Cecco had shown himself surprisingly handy for one who claimed to have been bred for a scholar, and he had made
himself useful fixing the axles on the wagons, mending and painting the props, but he did his work where I could see him through the curtain. I never wanted to stop seeing him. Annunziata and
Immaculata brought me broth, and food when I could take it, and a length of red tabby silk for a dress that they would sew for me. They brought me something else, too. I asked after my old friend.
Still with them, they said, though his eyes were glaucous now and he was tired-out by the coming heat. I asked them to help me out of the wagon one evening. I climbed gingerly to the ground, which
shifted a little beneath me, but holding their shoulders I could stand firm for the first time. Addio was there, gleeful, and Casinus, with new wheels to his trolley and a silver-topped stick with
a lion carved into its head to steer him along.