“No, of course not.” My bodyguard’s voice had gone sharp and cutting again, and I winced because I hadn’t meant to anger him. “Dwarves are not men, to be sure.”
“Now, that’s not what I meant.” I could see him retreating behind his book as he so often did, and I put my hand out and tipped the book down so I could meet his eyes. “You were there in the papal apartments when they stripped me, Leonello, and you were the only one I didn’t mind being there. Because every other man stood ogling me, but not you.”
“I assure you, I ogled.”
“No, you didn’t. I know you.” That didn’t please him, I could see. Men like Leonello want to be inscrutable; mysteries unto themselves. It irritated him no end to think that I might have him figured out. But he didn’t have that look of cynical anger anymore, so I hid my smile as I went on. “So, I’d like to have you at my second sitting too. Lounging there with your book, making caustic comments about Maestro Botticelli’s use of proportion. Because I still don’t really want to do this painting, after all, and it will go easier if I have a friend in attendance.”
Leonello looked at me for a moment, and then he picked up my hand and kissed it rather carelessly before tossing it back into my lap like a discarded glove. And that was how I found myself braving the streets of Florence with a pair of guards at my back and my friend at my side, making for Maestro Botticelli’s studio.
Leonello
Let my mistress tease the Florentines all she liked, telling them their great city was a little sister in Rome’s shadow—I did not like Florence at all. I didn’t like the furtive scurry of so many of its citizens as they hastened through the streets; I didn’t like the fervent gleam in so many eyes as they spoke of Savonarola and his latest dictates; I didn’t like the strange, heated excitement that perfumed the air like smoke: excitement laced with fear.
Maestro Botticelli’s face as he stood before my mistress in the door to his humble apartments could have been a sketch standing for all Florence: fervent and furtive, exalted and afraid.
“I am most sorry, Madonna Giulia.” He spoke brusquely in his rough Florentine accents, avoiding her eyes. “There will be no further sittings.”
“Are you ill?” Her eyes traveled behind the painter to his apartments. Normally any artist would have done my mistress the honor of calling upon her, but Giulia put no one out of his way if she could help it and had insisted on coming herself to Maestro Botticelli’s lodgings. A shabby little room or two in one of the seedier quarters of the city, stale-smelling and almost bare of furnishings. Maestro Botticelli’s lush Venuses of old might have earned him renown, but his new prim Madonnas were clearly not supporting him in comfort. “I can return on your convenience,” Giulia said. “Perhaps bring you a hot posset; this cold weather has been—”
“No.” The painter had a glitter in his eye, and not the fire of inspiration I’d seen as his chalk flew in the papal apartments and Giulia-as-Persephone emerged on the page. “I have prayed upon it, Madonna Giulia, and I cannot ignore the dictates of conscience. Even for the Holy Father, I cannot sully my paints upon”—looking at her fur-lined robe, the hair she had packed into a net so it could be easily shaken down for her sitting—“lewd subjects,” the painter finished.
“Now, really,” Giulia said, exasperated. “Why am I suddenly the lewd one? I didn’t want to be painted at all, much less with my clothes off, but now suddenly it’s all my fault?”
“I do apologize,” Maestro Botticelli mumbled. “I will write to the Holy Father in explanation—excuse me—” And he shut the door in our faces.
“Artists,” Giulia huffed, and kicked her robe out in a swirl as she stamped away from the rickety overhanging apartments with their crooked rooflines and the gutters with a dirty crust of old snow. “It’s a very fine line with them, isn’t it? Either you’re a great artistic inspiration, or you’re a tempting menace!”
“Why the pique?” I didn’t bother speeding my steps to keep up with her stamping; Madonna Giulia always slowed without being asked when she realized she was outpacing me. Two stolid guards tramped behind us, looking quite disconsolate that they weren’t to see the Bride of Christ shed her clothes this afternoon after all. “You didn’t want to finish the painting in the first place, after all.”
“There is that,” she conceded, and paused to let me catch up, smiling. Her fits of exasperation never lasted long. “Goodness, a free afternoon instead of sitting naked in a cold studio. Shall we go buy some of those tasty little roast pigeon things from the vendor by the old bridge? I always eat when I’m at loose ends. Or shall we catch a look at this pyre they’re building in the Piazza della Signoria? I hear it’s going to be twice as tall as a man!”
“It will have to be.” All through the past fortnight, Savonarola’s Angels had been swaggering up and down the streets of Florence, collecting “donations” for the great bonfire that was to come. Anyone who found themselves unwilling to part with their Murano glass goblets and their statues of a naked David might just find that the Angels had tipped the statue over on the way out the door, or broken the goblets with a misplaced elbow, so really it was better just to give and have done with it. Madonna Giulia’s sister and her sticklike husband had contributed a few ugly vases, one truly hideous credenza in gilt-edged oak, and a pile of silk gowns and velvet doublets that were not only outlawed under the new sumptuary laws, but also thoroughly out of fashion. “Let the men agonize about luxury and sin,” Giulia had said, winking at me as we peeked through the shutters to watch those gawky young Angels staggering away under the weight of Gerolama’s unwanted junk. “The women will just see an opportunity to clean house!”
I tossed my mistress’s copy of the Avernus sonnets into the pile for the bonfire when everyone’s back was turned. But Giulia rescued it before the Angels arrived, giving me a look. “Damn,” I sighed, and she replied demurely, “Good try, Leonello.”
“I do wish I could hear Fra Savonarola preach,” my mistress was saying now as we turned back across a narrow piazza in the direction of her sister’s house. “He’s supposed to be thrilling—my sister says you can really feel the fires of hell when he’s on a good rant. Gerolama does enjoy that sort of thing. She must have been crushed when he started forbidding women to attend his sermons. Really, I don’t see why we can’t go. It’s mostly us he’s preaching about, after all. Why don’t you go, Leonello, and have a listen for me the next time he gives a sermon?”
“I have no intention of being trampled by the fervent masses,” I informed her, and I must have been shielding my face from a gust of freezing February wind because I didn’t see the white-clad figures until the rough voice hailed us.
“Ho there! Madonna, you’d better have a good reason to be wandering these streets! A virtuous woman keeps to her household.”
Giulia’s guards braced, and I let my hands drift down toward the daggers at my belt as three swaggering young men in dirty-hemmed white robes approached us. Murkier tales of Savonarola’s Angels were told besides their devotion to their master and their singing of hymns—whispers of women harassed, of drunks and gamblers or simply those marked as “sinners” found beaten in the streets. I crooked my wrist at the angle that would bring my finger knife slipping into my hand with another twitch, but Giulia merely bowed her head in deepest greeting as the Angels arrayed themselves before her. “Good sirs,” she said, casting her lashes down piously. “I would not have strayed from the protection of my home at this time, but my sister took to her sickbed and required my care. I am only now hastening home.”
Apparently Savonarola’s Angels were no more immune to a woman’s beauty than any common guardsman. Their eyes flicked over her, and she stood meekly with her head bowed. I wondered what they might have said if she’d admitted she was returning from a failed rendezvous with an artist who had reneged on his promise to paint her as a naked, pagan goddess. I suppose there would have been a fight. Maybe my mistress was wise in her pious lies, but I wished she’d told th
e truth because I could have used a fight. First I’d take on the one in the middle, the stocky leader with his thumbs hooked into his belt and the rash of blemishes on his chin.
He was eyeing Giulia now, and with an interest that I doubt would have pleased the good Dominican friar he served. “I think we have a lady here who has missed contributing her due to the bonfire,” he told his fellow Angels, who both laughed. “That’s a fur collar I see, madonna—”
“Signora Gerolama,” Giulia said instantly, clever girl. “Wife to Signore Puccio Pucci, may God keep him always.”
“Well, Signora, that’s a fur collar I see, and stilt clogs under that hem. You think God does not see vanity, just because it’s hidden under your skirts?”
“I wear them only to keep my shoes from the mud—”
“Our Lord walked in mud. You are too good to follow in His footsteps?”
Giulia let her lashes drop over her eyes again and stepped out of her tall stilt clogs. “A donation,” she murmured, proffering them with a gesture and then detaching the fur collar from her robe. “I shall feed my womanly vanity into the flames.”
“God be praised,” intoned one of the other Angels, a stringy fellow not yet old enough to shave. He cast a look at me, and I thought it wise to surrender my worn deck of cards. I’d had that deck for more than five years, since the days I’d made my money playing primiera and fleecing sailors out of their wages . . . the other two guardsmen were quick to follow my lead, contributing between them a set of bone-carved dice and a little good-luck charm on a silver chain. I tensed as the stringy Angel sniffed at our contributions. If he tried to take my knives . . .
The stocky leader still looked dissatisfied with Giulia. My mistress had listened to her sister’s warnings about the new austerity demanded of the women of Florence, and kept her silks and jewels for the privacy of the sala—venturing out today, she wore a gray wool dress under her fur-lined robe, and not even a ring for adornment. There was nothing the Angels could reproach—except the fact that even wrapped in gray wool, La Bella looked luscious and bewitching and tempting enough to inspire all kinds of sin.
“That hair,” the Angel finally said. “That’s false hair, that is. A hairpiece that might as well be woven of vanity!”
“Vanity and immodesty!” the stringy Angel thundered.
“It’s not false hair,” my mistress protested. “It all grows on my head, I assure you.”
“You’re lying, madonna. No woman has that much hair.”
“Oh, Holy Virgin save me,” Giulia said, and in an exasperated jerk she pulled off the net and shook her hair down around her. “Does that satisfy you?”
The Angels all insisted on giving it a good tug to make sure it was real, and I tensed at Giulia’s side but her gaze flicked at me in warning.
“You should cut that hair and add it to the fire,” the first Angel warned, pulling the long waves through his fingers just a bit more slowly than I thought strictly necessary. “A woman’s hair is her vanity. She adorns herself with it, she takes pride in it, and soon enough she is plucking and dyeing like a whore.”
“Or like that pack of Borgia sluts in Rome.” The stringy Angel spat into the street. “The Pope’s daughter, she suns her hair all day while drinking and dallying with lovers.”
Giulia’s chin jerked at that. “Madonna Lucrezia is the most pious of girls—”
“A slut,” the first Angel insisted, and thrust something into my mistress’s hands. “Read this if you want the truth of it. Lucrezia Borgia plays the whore for her own father and her brothers, and so does that harlot princess from Naples. They pleasure themselves on the altars of the holy Basilica itself, drunken and naked, and the Pope and his pack of corrupt cardinals like to watch—”
“They do not!” Giulia burst out, and I breathed shallowly through my nose as all three Angels fastened their eyes on her.
“Contradicting the holy followers of Fra Savonarola,” the third Angel said in his squeaking voice, looking at the others. “This woman holds herself very high!”
“Too high.” The stocky Angel stepped closer to Giulia. “I think we will cut that hair for the fire after all, signora. Kneel!”
“I will do no such thing,” Giulia retorted, retreating back a sharp step before he could grab hold of her hair, and on my signal the other two guardsmen waded into Savonarola’s Angels.
The sounds of grunts and blows filled the cold street. All three Angels had stout staves, and one of Giulia’s guardsmen hissed a curse through his teeth as the scrawny Angel thumped him soundly across the shoulder. But my mistress’s guards had short swords, and both flashed out of their scabbards. “Pommels only,” I called, both knives drawn before my mistress as I kept out of the fray, because I wanted no bodies in the street today if I could help it. God only knew what punishment Florence’s mad Dominican friar would levy on anyone who killed one of his holy thugs. “Pommels,” I called again, “or flats of the blade!” Both guardsmen heard me, using their swords as cudgels rather than spilling blood with the cutting edges. One guard had got caught between two Angels, both of them buffeting him with their staves as they gave shrill whoops, and I stepped sideways to see if there was an angle where I could trip the scrawny one. But the stocky leader of the three saw my attention shift, and he darted around me to seize Giulia by the hair. “On your knees, whore” he whispered, and had his knife ready to saw through the gold mass doubled around his hand.
I darted back, my throat dry as a bone, ready to prickle him with steel, but my mistress—oh, my clever mistress. Rather than yank backward against the Angel’s grip, she flung herself forward against him and plastered her mouth over his. He went stiff all over in surprise, hand loosening in her hair for just an instant. Quite long enough for me to bump his knee out from under him with a blow of my knife hilt. Giulia helped with a shove of her own to the burly chest, and he fell flat on his back in the muddy street.
“Guards!” I rapped out, and both guardsmen lunged back to array themselves before their mistress and me. One of the guards had a bloody nose and the other had a set of knuckles that would be the size of cabbages tomorrow, but they’d left both Angels groaning over smashed shins and bleeding heads.
“Good sir,” I said, addressing the stocky Angel with all the bland politeness I could muster as he scraped himself off the stones with a very red face. “I do apologize for any pain we have caused your fellows. Be assured we will be on our way, and my mistress will keep to her household in future like a modest and decent woman.”
“She kissed me!” the stocky Angel shouted, pointing at my mistress, who was speedily bundling her hair back into its net. “She kissed me, that foul harlot—”
“And this foul harlot has the French pox,” Giulia said sweetly. “Enjoy the pustules!”
They started for her again, and I showed them the knives in my hands. “Come one step closer and I will spear your eyes in their sockets like grapes,” I said. “I suggest you be on your way. Plenty of sinners in this city, after all, and we have already made our donations to Fra Savonarola’s fire. Good day, and God keep you.”
The stocky Angel scowled, looking more than ready to continue the quarrel, and part of me hoped he would. But the other two looked bruised and embarrassed, already edging back down the street, and their leader seemed to realize he stood alone now against Giulia, me, and both of our large, grinning, and truculent guards. “Be on your way, madonna,” he warned her with a dark look, rubbing ostentatiously at his lips where she had glued hers. Somehow I doubted he was truly as sorry about that kiss as he pretended. Sorry, perhaps, that it had not been one whit sincere. “And meditate on your sins! Vanity, pride, and unbridled lust. We put women in the stocks for less in Florence!”
He strode to catch up with his fellows and they regained something of their swagger as they retreated from us, taking up three quarters of the street and forcing the few cloaked and hurrying passersby to squeeze out of their way. I didn’t sheathe the knife in my hand unti
l they were out of sight, and only then did I let out the breath I had been holding. “Madonna Giulia,” I said, “we go home at once.”
She nodded, and we set a swift pace back toward her sister’s house.
“Clever trick, that kiss,” I said. “Very quick of you.”
“You were about to kill him,” she said, and quoted my own words at me from just before I had vaulted into the bullring. “‘If a man’s about to die, he should get to kiss a beautiful woman first.’”
“Very true,” I said, and we both fell silent. I kept one unobtrusive hand on my dagger as we hastened along, the sound of my boots muffled in the cold. Florence’s streets were empty except for the occasional beggar or harried housewife or drinker too far gone in his cups to be careful. All Florence knew by now it was better to stay in, stay safe, stay behind locked doors where at least they couldn’t be seized by Angels and accused of sinning.
The moment we were safe inside her sister’s doors, Madonna Giulia sank down on the first wall bench without even bothering to shed her cloak. She was looking at something—whatever it was the Angels had thrust into her hands before the struggle began.
“What’s that?” I asked as I took off my cloak, and she showed me wordlessly. A pamphlet: cheaply printed, smudgily illustrated. The familiar bulky figure of Pope Alexander VI showed on the first page, reproduced badly in his papal tiara. He had been printed with a leer on his face and the flames of hell licking around him.
“Do people really believe such things?” Giulia whispered, turning the pages with the very tips of her fingers. “It’s—it’s filth.”
“People love to tell filthy rumors of the great, Madonna Giulia.” I motioned the guardsmen inside—Get yourselves a good drink, you’ve earned it—and turned back to my mistress where she sat with her snow-damp skirts around her on the tiles of the entry. “Your cloak, if you please.”
She surrendered it without argument, still looking down at the pamphlet. “This isn’t just filthy rumors, Leonello, it’s foul. And it’s not just—here they say the Holy Father steals the estates of dead cardinals to fill his coffers—that he sells offices and benefices by the cartload—that he promotes his family and his ‘rapacious Catalan minions’—really, minions? That any king in Europe who wishes to put away a devout queen to marry his mistress can buy a divorce from ‘this bastard marrano pope . . .’” More pages turned. “That Juan is a murderer and a violator of virgins . . . that Cesare practices the dark arts and fornicates with his sister—how can people believe such things?”