The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series) Page 7

  “Mi dispiace, Messer Vespucci,” Giovanni managed contritely around a mouthful of bread. Crumbs littered the front of his linen shirt.

  Giovanni's tall, well-muscled father looked towards Guid'Antonio and glanced at the ceiling, as if seeking guidance from heaven. The smile on Guid'Antonio's lips faded a bit. Where was his Giovanni at this moment? Napping? Playing with—what would his son play with? He had no idea.

  Following as it did in Giovanni's boisterous wake, Bianca de' Medici's footstep on the threshold sounded barely audible. Guid'Antonio checked when he saw Lorenzo's sister and saw the sudden heat burn high in her face. No wonder! Bianca de' Medici suffered the spectacularly grievous misfortune of having married Guglielmo de' Pazzi, whose mad brother, Francesco, had butchered Giuliano. For his sister's husband, in the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy, Lorenzo had chosen uncertainty over execution. Now Guglielmo de' Pazzi ate the bitter bread of exile outside the city walls, sentenced to a distance of no closer than five and no farther than twenty miles from Florence. This was a tender mercy Guid'Antonio did not approve. Guglielmo de' Pazzi, with no inkling of his brother's black alliance with the Pope and his nephew?

  Guid'Antonio's doubts lingered, and he would not let it go.

  Bianca acknowledged him with a slight inclination of the head. “Messer Vespucci, welcome home.” With quiet dignity, she turned to Lorenzo. “Allora? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  She left momentarily. From beyond the doors, Guid'Antonio heard voices, low and hushed. When Lorenzo's sister returned, she brought with her on her hip a boy of about two years.

  “Messer Vespucci.” Bianca's voice rang proud yet sweet. “Meet Giuliano's son. Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici.”

  The boy fixed clear brown eyes on Guid'Antonio and stared unwaveringly at him.

  A rush of blood scorched Guid'Antonio's hands and face, and his heart slowed. Giuliano de' Medici had no children. But little Giulio's complexion appeared smooth and dark, his eyes darker, his cheeks tinged with pink. Watching Guid'Antonio, the boy ducked his head, a bashful smile lighting his angel face.

  Guid'Antonio moved his lips, but no words came. No, never the slightest doubt: this shining boy was Giuliano the Beautiful's by-blow. “How?” he managed, baffled.

  Lorenzo's light laugh could not disguise his deep emotion. “In the usual way, I expect.”

  “But where did you find him?”

  “Not on the doorstep. A few months after Giuliano died, the boy's grandmother brought Giulio to us. That was the first we knew of him. After all, everything was not lost,” Lorenzo said quietly.

  This is Florence's miracle; this secret child found, Guid'Antonio thought, his mind racing, one part of him too experienced and too afraid to believe. “Come to me?” he said, and held out his hands to the boy, for Bianca to give him over.

  Giulio's inquiring glance sought his aunt; gently, she put him down. “He can walk, Messer Vespucci. If he has good cause.”

  Walk Giulio did, with his arms extended to Guid'Antonio, all smiles and trust. Guid'Antonio picked the child up and buried his face in the shining black tangle of curls. Hugging the boy, into the sweet, shell pink ear he said softly, “No harm shall ever come to you, my boy. On my life's blood, I swear.”

  The afternoon had worn almost entirely away when Bianca departed with the two boys, Giovanni de' Medici singing and skipping along beside her while baby Giulio, safe in Bianca's arms, peered over his shoulder at Guid'Antonio, his large eyes dark and glowing. “Bye,” came the soft echo of Giulio's voice as he floated from the apartment with his aunt. “Bye, bye.”

  Guid'Antonio felt keenly the silence engulfing him, now he was alone with Lorenzo, who slid the bolt home and said, “What the people have put up, they may as easily destroy.”

  “They have no reason to fear you and yours.”

  “No just reason, true. Nor was there any reason for anyone to kill my brother, except for pride and envy. And yet today, once again, according to City Hall, everything is at stake. Our lives, our homes, our families, our city. They say the weeping Virgin is testament to that. Time and again, people seek proof, signs and symbols to believe in.”

  “Then it's proof we shall give them,” Guid'Antonio said. “Not of our guilt, but of our innocence. It's not we who battle the Church, but the Church that battles us.”

  Lorenzo's dark features were a somber mask. “All I ask is the truth.”

  “Good. Because the truth is all we need. I'll find out who's causing the painting to weep; all else unravels there.”

  In silence, the two men walked across the courtyard garden beneath the late afternoon sky, past Donatello's bronze statue of Judith Slaying Holofernes. With one hand Judith gripped her sword, with the other, she grasped Holofernes' head back by the hair, exposing his naked throat in all its vulnerability. A shiver passed over Guid'Antonio, exactly, he supposed, as Donatello had intended when he sculpted the statue for Lorenzo's grandfather, Cosimo de' Medici.

  A gate, high and made of iron, opened onto Via Dei Gori and San Lorenzo marketplace. Lorenzo lifted the inner bolt and moved aside, allowing Guid'Antonio to step into the street. The market was closed, the long stone bench built along the Medici Palace wall empty and shadowed, the gossips having gone home to a porridge made of millet and beans, if they were men of good fortune. Guid'Antonio saw no sign of the dead mastiff. But then Alessandro Braccesi would have entered the palace off Via Larga, through the main gate, just as Guid'Antonio had done earlier today. No doubt the cane corso Italiano still lay there with his skull crushed, his carcass trampled by horses' hooves and battered by sandals and hard-heeled boots.

  As if on impulse, Guid'Antonio turned back to Lorenzo, frowning a bit, reflective and curious. “What do you think about the young woman captured by Turks?” He shrugged and spread his hands. “As crazy as that may be.”

  Lorenzo blinked. And blinked again. He moved back into the shadows a pace, his heavy eyebrows drawn together and down. “Camilla Rossi da Vinci, you mean.”

  “You knew her?”

  “As Castruccio Senso's wife, yes. He's a wine merchant, Guid'Antonio. Olives, oil. We employ him to buy and sell wine for us occasionally, but only when necessity dictates. He brought Camilla here three years ago at Christmas. We had a banquet for our business associates.” Lorenzo shrugged his broad shoulders. “The man's an idiot.”

  Guid'Antonio raised his brow in question.

  Lorenzo flashed the one-thousand-candle smile. “He's just a fool, Guid'Antonio. Or perhaps not.” The smile widened to an unabashed grin. “He didn't stay long that night. He found the attention lavished on his beautiful young wife disconcerting, I believe. One moment they were here, the next, they had vanished like ghosts.”

  An interesting analogy, Guid'Antonio thought. “She's pretty?” he said.

  Lorenzo shook his hair back from his face. “As a poppy. Hair black and shiny as silk, and her cheeks? When she blushed, their natural bloom turned full crimson. And she blushed often, always with a shy smile. Particularly when Giuliano caught her eye. Fetching. Ah, well.”

  Guid'Antonio, heretofore watching a solitary young man untie his horse from an iron ring set in the palace wall, glanced swiftly back to Lorenzo. “Do you suspect a lover?” In Lorenzo's face, he read discomfort. It intrigued him.

  “I suspect nothing, Guid'Antonio. But what else explains the lady's disappearance? In her behalf, I will say cuckolding her husband seems contrary to her nature. The night she came here she appeared exceedingly innocent. Still, a girl doesn't have to have lain with a man to see him as a means of escape.”

  “How ‘innocent’?” Guid'Antonio said.

  “It was a Christmas gathering,” Lorenzo said, beginning to evidence an air of impatience. “We, most of us, anyway, drank and danced and sang.”

  “Your carnival songs?”

  Lorenzo grinned. “Of course. And from Camilla, they drew a rich blush.”

  “So I would think.” We have some bean pods, long and tend
er, quite firm and big, first take the tail in hand, then rub it gently up and down . . .

  “At any rate,” Lorenzo was saying, “one might even describe Camilla as virginal, but for her married state.” His brown eyes twinkled with mischief. “Or because of it, given her husband Castruccio's bandy legs and sour breath.”

  “And she a young woman of favorable means,” Guid'Antonio mused, “traveling with only an old nurse and a slave boy? What route did they take?”

  Lorenzo folded his arms over his chest. “From what Palla told me after his inquiry, Camilla's party left Florence and rode as far as San Gimi. There they passed the night. At daybreak, they left for Morba. Not a long distance, Guid'Antonio.”

  Morba: a small resort town known for its healing spring waters. Guid'Antonio considered Lorenzo's words. And, yes, they matched Luca Landucci's statement in the market this morning. Now, as then, a question flickered briefly in his mind; again, like a vapor of smoke, it evaporated.

  “Distance enough for mischief,” he said.

  Lorenzo shrugged vaguely. “Palla investigated the place where Camilla is said to have disappeared and discovered nothing mysterious. Signs of travelers, yes—it's a well-traveled road. But nothing indicating a struggle with someone bent on committing a crime. Certainly not Turks. Just a rough reed cross put there by locals to ward off devils. And before you ask, yes, Palla questioned the nurse and the boy. Camilla's father, too, at great length. Jacopo Rossi da Vinci.”

  Guid'Antonio had not had any intention of asking about the investigation conducted by Florence's chief of police: Luca had told him about the investigation earlier today. But Luca had not mentioned Camilla's father, Jacopo. Hmmm. He chewed his lip, his mind stubborn and willful. Like it or not, the girl's disappearance was another charge against Lorenzo, given so many Florentines believed God had unleashed the Turks against them as punishment for Lorenzo's war with the Church. “She disappeared a week ago?” Guid'Antonio said.

  “A little over. Yes.”

  He had just missed it. Damn. “What of the husband, Castruccio Senso?” he said.

  “What of him?”

  “How has he taken his wife's disappearance?”

  Lorenzo snorted. “How would you expect, given she's a beautiful girl of sixteen? Distraught, on the face of it. I've seen him on the street since. And Palla corroborated it.”

  “You question the merchant's sincerity?”

  “I question everything. As do you, according to your nature. The one thing I know is this: no corpse, no proof of foul play, no crime, and yet people will lay Camilla Rossi da Vinci at my door, just as they do the weeping painting.”

  “They already have,” Guid'Antonio said and, once again, he turned away.

  SEVEN

  A short while after leaving Lorenzo, Guid'Antonio crossed the Vespucci Palace garden, his tired glance seeking the scrittoio where he, Amerigo, and Amerigo's brother, Antonio Vespucci, tended the family bookkeeping. Antonio had carried the weight of it these last two years: wine, silk, wool, banking, commercial ventures in Bruges, Antwerp, and Ghent. All that and more in a far-flung commercial tapestry whose constant and meticulous care covered the family with vast financial rewards. At the moment, the scrittoio's solid wooden door stood closed and secured with a padlock and iron bolt.

  He ascended the stone stairwell, the wall cool beneath the touch of his fingers. He had told Maria he would be home no later than midday. Jesu. He imagined her in their bedchamber, poised to strike at him again. Well. He would coax her from her ill humor, kiss her mouth, and play his fingers through her silky hair, willing to let bygones be bygones. He would strike a spark, then hold the blown flame to the wick. Afterward, they would acknowledge how wrong they each had been earlier today. God knew he desired a peaceful marriage with Maria del Vigna.

  At the top of the stairs, a shimmer of light appeared.

  Quickening his step, he entered the dark corridor and collided with a young girl. In one hand, she held a candle. In the other, she grasped the hand of a small boy. His son, Giovanni.

  The girl jumped back, her features startled in the flaring candlelight. “Christ on the Cross!” she yelped. “I took you for an apparition! Who are you?” Scowling, she noted Guid'Antonio's solid form. “What right have you here?”

  The question startled him. “Mi scusi, Signorina. Io sono Guid'Antonio Vespucci.”

  In the hallway shadows, the girl's eyes grew round as florins. “You? No!” Boldly, cheeks glowing, she examined him up and down. “Here's a pleasant surprise now.”

  He smiled, gently amused. “And you are?” But of course he knew this must be the indiscriminate young nurse Maria had sought early this morning. Olimpia something or other, the girl who had replaced Giovanni's former caretaker.

  “Olimpia Pasquale,” she said.

  Giovanni appeared fresh from the bath. The boy's cotton nightgown hung in loose folds from his thin shoulders to his bare feet. Soft tendrils of dark damp hair curled around Olimpia's freshly scrubbed face. Her mouth, slightly open, revealed teeth like pearls. She reminded Guid'Antonio of the ethereal beauties Sandro Botticelli was so wont to paint. About her and Giovanni both, he caught the faint scent of apples.

  “Buena sera, Giovanni.” Guid'Antonio bent slightly from the waist with his hands on the tops of his thighs. “How would you like to visit a dairy farm next week where a good friend of ours raises cows?”

  Giovanni's frowning expression fell neatly between boredom and disgust. “I've seen cows in the marketplace,” he said, his eyes dark and petulant.

  Olimpia grinned. “Stallions, too. With mares. Making an impressive display.”

  Guid'Antonio uttered a sharp laugh. “That I don't doubt. Giovanni, we'll accompany two other boys, one your age, who has the same name, too.”

  “I know a basketful of Giovannis.” The child pursed his lips, and his scowl deepened. In Guid'Antonio, his expression found its match.

  “This particular boy,” he informed his son coldly, “is Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici. Believe me, there is none other like him in your basket, no matter how deep or large.” He turned toward the girl. “Buena sera, Signorina.” He made as if to move past them down the corridor.

  “Messer Vespucci?”

  “Yes.”

  “You're seeking your wife, I think.”

  He paused, a warning uncoiling like a snake in his breast. “Yes.”

  “She's flown.”

  He stared stupidly at the girl. Flown? At this gray hour, there were few places in the city a respectable woman might go. At any hour, in fact, other than church. “Flown where?” he said.

  “To her mother's house. Mona Alessandra del Vigna is ill.”

  “Ill?” he repeated after the girl, wanting to shake her, feeling like one of the mimics who pantomimed your words in the piazzas on festival days till you wanted to slap them silly. “What do you mean ‘ill’?”

  “A messenger came to the gate. Mona Maria pulled into her cloak and flew off down the street with him, leaving me with Giovanni.” Olimpia regarded the boy, her expression one of genuine warmth.

  Guid'Antonio rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “Have you seen Amerigo?”

  “Ummm-hmmm, he's in the saletta with your other kinsmen.”

  “Send word to me there the instant the lady returns, if you will, Signorina.”

  Olimpia made a pretty pout. “Not this night, Messer Vespucci. Or tomorrow, either, most like.”

  He would not falter before this girl. “Why in God's name not?”

  “My grandmother has an ache in the gut,” Giovanni piped up.

  Don't we both, Guid'Antonio thought.

  “Giovanni,” Olimpia protested, but mildly. “Let it suffice to say your nonna lies gravely ill.”

  Guid'Antonio stared at the servant-girl. “How is it Maria didn't mention her mother's condition to me earlier today?”

  “Suddenly,” Olimpia said. “Perhaps your lady hadn't time enough this morning.” Her expression appeared
fresh and innocent.

  Surely, God danced. Gravely ill, Olimpia had said. Guid'Antonio felt compassion for Mona Alessandra, yes. Who knew better than he how sickness and death waited for no one, including him and his family? But he felt disappointment, too.

  “Pray Mary looks over our family tonight,” he said, and crossed himself.

  Olimpia's brazen glance slid down his chest and legs to his boots and slowly back up again. “You wanted your wife,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I'll come to your bed tonight.”

  A jolt shot through his loins. He glanced at Giovanni, who looked back at him without blinking, measuring and distant. Guid'Antonio did not answer at once, sharply aware of the plump curve of Olimpia's breasts beneath the light linen shift: no mere apples there. “Ah, thank you—no.” After a moment, he added awkwardly, “Sleep well, Olimpia Pasquale.”

  “Better than you,” she said, the corners of her full mouth tipping up in a smile.

  “No doubt.” Silently turning away, his face burning with high heat, he descended into the garden, his fingers retracing the walls of the stone stairwell.

  Arista alla fiorentina: pork loin seasoned with rosemary, garlic, and cloves and then slowly, lovingly, roasted until, crispy on the outside and juicy, with just a sweet trace of pink within, the meat was so tender, you could cut it with one of the forks recently introduced to Florence, thence into the Vespucci household.

  Guid'Antonio breathed deeply, inhaling the tantalizing fragrance, making his way back past the courtyard fountain toward the saletta, the informal dining room he and his kinsmen shared when they weren't entertaining guests in the sala or in one of their private apartments. Familiar voices floated to him, rising and falling in warm camaraderie.

  At the sound of his step on the threshold, the four men seated around the trestle table broke into a welcoming chorus. His nephew, Antonio Vespucci, rose and kissed him on both cheeks, his face alight with gladness. “Uncle, you did return from France with my little brother! I was beginning to doubt him.”