‘Ah, at last,’ he said when he saw me. ‘I thought you would never wake!’
‘Is there anything to eat?’ I said.
‘Your throat is better then?’ he asked, fetching bread and honey and a cup of wine.
‘Still a bit tender,’ I said, massaging my neck. ‘But I’ll manage. I feel as hollow as a cast bronze.’
‘Not a man of marble, then.’
‘All too mortal, I’m afraid.’
‘Can you tell me now what happened?’ he asked. ‘I could make very little of that jumble of words when you turned up the night before last.’
That was when I knew I had lost a day.
I told him everything I could remember, even though it meant admitting my relation to Clarice and the boy.
‘It was good of Grazia to warn you,’ he said.
‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen her? I am confused about the days. Did you go to your studio yesterday?’
‘Yes, though it was not easy getting through the city. The piazza is stained with blood and there are armed men on every street corner.’
‘Did you see the statue? Is it safe? And was there any sign of Michelangelo?’
He held up his hands. ‘I haven’t answered you about Grazia yet,’ he said. ‘I did eventually get to the Visdomini house and it was in an uproar. Ser Visdomini had been arrested for causing an affray. His wife was in a terrible state. Grazia was trying to calm everything down and keep the household running.’
‘Did she ask about me?’
‘I told her you were with me and she was relieved. You are lucky that she cares so much.’
I sensed rebuke in his words. I knew Leone did not think I had treated Grazia well; and privately I agreed with him.
‘I’m glad she is all right. What is the rest of the news in the city?’
‘Well, the statue is unharmed. It is being guarded again. And Michelangelo is there with it – he doesn’t leave it night or day, they say.’
‘He must be worried about me too. Could you take him a message from me?’
Leone nodded.
‘What are they saying about Altobiondi?’
‘That he was badly wounded in the piazza and just managed to reach home before he died.’
‘Is there any news about Clarice or little Davide?’
He shook his head.
But it wasn’t long before I heard about them. I had a visitor after Leone left. I was at first scared to open the door but the knock had been so faint that I did not think it would be an officer I saw when I lifted the latch.
It was Simonetta; she had come across the river on her own, in spite of all the dangers in the city, to find me at the painter’s house.
I clasped her hand, really pleased to see her.
‘Tell me what’s been going on, please. I’ve been going mad, hiding out here and not knowing. How is Clarice? And the boy?’
‘She was still frantic when the Watch came but they understood that to be only natural,’ she said. ‘They took the body away and the funeral will be tomorrow. Since then she has been calmer – her women tell me she has been sleeping a lot.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘And Davide?’
‘I have been each day to see him,’ she said. ‘He is recovering well. I think perhaps small children don’t always remember the thing that has frightened them.’
‘I do hope so,’ I said. ‘It was a thing of nightmare.’
‘Remember he didn’t see his mother strike the blow,’ said Simonetta softly. ‘Perhaps in time he will believe what everyone else does – that his father was killed in a fight in the piazza.’
Hadn’t she heard Altobiondi say he was not Davide’s father? Or was she just being tactful?
‘It is good of you to go and see them,’ I said. ‘Will you let Clarice know where I am? I dare not go near the Palazzo Altobiondi until after its master is in the ground.’
‘You need clean clothes,’ she said, looking at me. ‘Yours are all stained with blood.’
‘I have nothing to change into here,’ I said, shuddering as I remembered the fountain of blood pulsing from Altobiondi’s neck. ‘But Leone is going to see my brother the sculptor today. He will bring me some.’
‘It’s best not to be seen in the street till you can burn these,’ she said, touching my sleeve.
Then she sat in a chair and put her face in her hands. I realised how much she had been through in these last days and she probably hadn’t slept. Davide might forget what had happened that night, but she had seen it all.
Leone did bring me fresh clothes but they were the now hated livery of the pro-Mediceans. Still, Angelo had chosen the black suit given to me after Piero’s death so I looked sober enough. But I did not dare attend Altobiondi’s funeral in the cathedral.
Suppose he had told his friends – those that weren’t still in the Stinche – about me and Clarice? They might take revenge on me for that even if they didn’t suspect me of any involvement in his death.
But I did go to the square and see my likeness peering out from his wooden castle.
The worst of the bloodstains had been scrubbed from the terracotta tiles of the piazza, but to me the square still rang with screams and the clash of steel on steel. More than before I wanted to leave the city. Yet I still had so much unfinished business there.
The guards didn’t recognise me in my black velvet but Angelo poked his head out from the scaffolding when he heard my voice.
‘Gabriele!’
He jumped down and hugged me to his chest.
‘I am glad to see you well,’ he said. ‘Come up.’
I was too finely dressed to work on the statue but I could see he had managed to make some progress on his own. No one knew the details of that marble as well as my brother and I did.
‘I see you can use your arm again,’ I said.
He held it out and flexed the muscles in his forearm.
‘You and Antonio did a good job,’ he said. ‘And no one ever knew I had been hurt. I shall always be grateful for that.’
‘I’m sorry I left you when the battle broke out,’ I said, suddenly feeling tears building up in my eyes.
‘Don’t worry. Leone explained it all to me. He’s a good man, that painter.’ Angelo patted my arm. ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with.’
‘If only that were true. But I see you are not at the funeral.’
‘I had no reason to go,’ he said. ‘Altobiondi was no friend of mine. From everything you have told me the world is well rid of him. It was you I was worried about.’
‘I seem to have got away with it,’ I said.
‘Got away with what? From what I heard you did nothing except defend yourself and that is not a crime, even in this lawless city.’
‘No one must ever know it was Clarice,’ I said quietly. ‘I would take the blame if anyone ever said she had done it.’
‘Well, let’s hope it never comes to that,’ said Angelo.
But we had reckoned without Andrea Visdomini.
Chapter Twenty-two
I Once Was What You Are
I was once again staying at Lodovico’s house now that the city was calming down. Even Angelo came back to sleep there since the statue was under constant guard. I hadn’t dared to be seen at Clarice’s house and nor did I show my face at Visdomini’s. He could think me dead in the fray if he liked. I knew he had been released from prison but I never expected to see him again.
I was very careful about being seen in the city. Angelo had given me some time off and the only time I went out in public was to Donato’s funeral, which took place the day after Altobiondi’s, in the church of Santa Maria Novella.
It was Angelo’s favourite church in the city and yet I had never been in it. I knelt, feeling full of remorse as the coffin was borne in. Donato’s parents and brother followed behind, Giulio with his arm in a sling.
If I hadn’t been fighting with Altobiondi, the brothers would not have come to my rescue. But who was to say t
hey would have survived that night unscathed without my involvement?
My eyes were drawn back again and again to the fresco of the Trinity on the left-hand wall of the nave. My neighbour in the pew told me it was by that same ‘Big Tom’ who painted the Adam and Eve I had so admired in the church south of the river. That was the day Angelo had talked to me about being republican and the importance in this city of knowing what side you were on. Those days seemed impossibly lost and far away now.
Under this painting was another of a skeleton lying in its grave, with the inscription: I once was what you are and what I am you also will be. It made me shiver. Donato was well on his way to becoming what the skeleton was. I was aware of my strong bones inside my limbs and the shape of my own skull. Big Tom was right and he too had been long in his grave and was like the painted skeleton now.
After the funeral, Giulio came up to speak to me.
‘I’m glad Altobiondi got what he deserved,’ he said. ‘You saved me a job. He was the one who killed my brother and cut my arm to the bone.’
‘Not me,’ I said, but Giulio just patted me on the elbow.
Those days I constantly took out my hoard of money from under my mattress and counted it. By the time the David would be ready to shed its wooden castle, I wanted to be ready to go home.
It was Gismondo who alerted me to the new danger I was in.
He came home out of breath. ‘Quick, Gabriele, you’d better hide yourself. The Watch are coming to arrest you.’
‘What for?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe they were catching up with me so many days after the battle.
‘The murder of Antonello de’ Altobiondi,’ said Gismondo.
I didn’t stop to find out more. I took my money, bundled up some clothes and made my escape through the back yard, with Gismondo hurrying me the whole time.
‘Tell Angelo I’ve gone back to Leone’s,’ I told him.
I took a long detour through the maze of little streets in Santa Croce and crossed the river by the Ponte alle Grazie. There was no sound of running feet behind me.
My heart was heavy at the thought of having to go back into hiding. I was sick of this hot and sticky city, with its violence and its secrets, its factions and its vendettas.
I wanted to be up in the clean air of my hilltop village, cutting stone by day and cuddling my girl at night. But if I was to survive to live that life I had to lie low now.
Leone was shocked to see me again so soon and – something else – he seemed . . . embarrassed. I couldn’t think why. But he welcomed me warmly enough, especially when I told him I was on the run from the city Watch. I used some of my money to send out for a roast chicken and a big carafe of wine. I didn’t want to abuse the painter’s hospitality.
We were picking over the chicken bones when there came a thunderous knocking at the door.
Leone looked at me in alarm. I gathered up my things and was about to make a run for it when I heard a familiar voice calling Leone’s name.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s my brother.’
Angelo came in like a bear; he had run all the way from the piazza as soon as he heard the news. Leone poured him a cup of wine and he tossed it back in one gulp.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘You heard what’s happened?’
‘Only that the Watch want me for Altobiondi’s murder,’ I said. ‘Gismondo told me.’
‘Well, it seems Visdomini was not happy with the explanation given out for his friend’s death. He has witnesses who saw you fighting in the square and another who will swear you were in Altobiondi’s palazzo the moment he died.’
I groaned. Who could have seen me there? One of the women? I couldn’t have told anyone who had been there that night apart from Clarice and Simonetta.
‘But the worst thing is that Visdomini is saying there is no way a man, however devoted to his wife, can struggle back to die in his own house when his throat has been cut. He is having the body dug up.’
We were silent. The game was up. Once it was general knowledge how Altobiondi had died, the suspects would be those people who were in the chamber at the time. Better they should think it was me than know it was Clarice. Davide could not lose another parent.
Angelo could see what I intended to do.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t have it.’
‘What else can I do?’ I said. But I felt sick. I had been so close to escaping the city.
‘We shall get you out,’ said Angelo. ‘And we’ll say you died of your wounds. Your reputation will be damaged but you will survive.’
At least he hadn’t told me to betray Clarice to the authorities.
There was another pounding at the door. This time Leone cautiously lifted the latch and peered out. He opened the door wide and let in Gismondo.
‘You’re still here,’ Angelo’s warlike brother said to me. ‘I hoped you might have left by now. They’ve put a guard on every city gate. Everyone’s been told to stop Gabriele from escaping.’
‘And everyone knows what he looks like,’ said Leone. ‘Everyone in the city has seen his likeness.’
‘Then we must change it,’ said Angelo.
He looked at me very seriously. I didn’t know what he was going to do, at least not straight away, but I trusted him with my life.
And then he smashed his fist into my face.
When I came to, I could hardly see. Angelo was sitting with his head in his hands and Leone was soaking strips of linen in cold water and laying them over my face. It eased the pain a little but I knew I would soon have two dramatic black eyes. My nose throbbed. I had felt it break and I guessed it had swollen to twice its usual size – I must look a sight.
Gismondo was bouncing about the room in a state of high excitement.
‘You certainly don’t look like the statue any more,’ he said. ‘This might work.’
Angelo groaned. ‘I’m sorry, Gabriele,’ he said coming and putting his arm round my shoulder. ‘It was the only way. But I know how much pain you are in – it was what Torrigiani did to me all those years ago.’
I couldn’t speak at first for the shock and the pain. I looked into Angelo’s worried face and saw his own broken nose.
‘Now we really shall look like brothers,’ I mumbled.
‘My brave boy,’ he said. ‘It hurts me to destroy something beautiful. I am in the business of making such things – not breaking them.’
‘What’s the plan?’ asked Leone. ‘He is not fit to travel like this.’
‘No,’ said Angelo. ‘Will you keep him safe here? We’ll go back and spread the rumour that Gabriele died of his wounds sustained in the piazza a week ago.’
I tried to think how many people had seen me since then.
‘I went to Donato’s funeral,’ I managed to say.
‘I shall visit his family,’ said Angelo, ‘and ask them to keep quiet about that.’
‘His brother Giulio thinks I did it anyway,’ I said. ‘He sort of congratulated me. I don’t think he’ll hand me over to the Watch.’
‘You will stay here till your new injuries have healed,’ said Angelo. ‘And then we’ll get you out of the city with my father’s carter.’
And that’s what happened. I still remember the pain of my broken nose – the difficulty in breathing which remains with me to this day. They hacked at my hair with a kitchen knife till all my curls were shorn and I didn’t shave for nearly two weeks.
So it was a wretched figure who climbed into the cart the day I left Florence for good. I looked like a prizefighter with my battered nose, the yellowish green remains of the bruising round my eyes, my shorn head and my bristly face. I wore a working man’s clothes, after a lot of deliberation. Was Gabriele better known in the city as Angelo’s stone-carver assistant or as a pro-Medicean dandy?
They decided that it was the association with the compagnacci that I had better avoid and they took all my fine clothing away to burn it. I let it go without regret.
During my period o
f convalescence, Grazia had come to sit with me several times and Simonetta once or twice. They both wept over my changed appearance.
I begged them both, separately, to forgive me for any trouble I had got them into. I shall never forget that the grave and composed Simonetta had felled Altobiondi with one of his own chairs. And Grazia had come to warn me that the man knew of my past with Clarice.
As I got ready to leave the city, I remembered how I had arrived in it three and a half years ago. I had been so innocent and callow; that very first night I had ended up in Clarice’s bed. How little I had understood about the ways of the world then. And I had no idea of what the consequences of that first night would be.
‘Ready?’ asked Leone.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ I said. My voice had changed since Angelo’s assault; it now sounded a bit nasal, even to me.
Angelo had already come to say goodbye. He thought it better not to accompany me because of our well-known association.
Since the day he had broken my nose, he had worn black, not because he mourned my lost looks, but in support of the rumour that I had died. I believe the whole of Lodovico’s household did it and so high was my brother’s reputation in the city, because of the marble Giant, that his feigned grief was believed.
It was weird to think that people believed I was dead. And in a way I was. My old self had died anyway – the Gabriele who was so carefree and unworldly.
I climbed aboard the cart, which had come into the city with a load of fresh vegetables from Lodovico’s farm. As well as me, it was taking back some cooking pots and lengths of cloth from the Buonarrotis’ shop. I settled myself down as comfortably as I could and faced the journey to the gate in the north-east of the city.
As far as the carter was concerned, I was a farmhand from the country near Pisa, who was seeking work away from the troubles in that region; Lodovico had hired me to work on his own farm in Settignano and my name was Michele. That was all he needed to know and I wasn’t inclined to chat to him on the journey.
‘Halt!’ cried the guards on the gate.
I could feel my heart thudding against my chest. If they stopped us now and recognised me, I would be taken back into the city and thrown into the Stinche. If found guilty of Altobiondi’s death – as I had no doubt I would be – they would take me into the courtyard of the Bargello and cut off my head with no more hesitation than if I were a chicken destined for the dining-table.