The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series) Page 9

  “Enlightened age?” Nastagio said now. “Here's the devil's method, and you would do well to heed it. Who's seen Niccolò Ardinghelli lately? No one has in these streets. Swat the annoying husband away like a fly! Or like a wasp,” he said, his voice coy as he wagged his finger at Guid'Antonio. “An ambassadorship can be a sentence of exile, as well as an honor. The trick is knowing which is which.”

  Guid'Antonio's face burned with increasing heat. Niccolò Ardinghelli was married to Lucrezia Donati. Lucrezia, so the gossips said, was Lorenzo's lover and had been since the green days of their youth. People tittered and pointed behind Ambassador Niccolò Ardinghelli's back; Guid'Antonio had heard them and seen them do it. Poor, cuckolded Niccolò, who spent more time outside Florence tending State affairs than he did at home, tending his own marriage. The eternal devoted ambassador. A Medici man through and through.

  Antonio and Amerigo traded glances. Brother Giorgio reached out a restraining hand. “Nastagio, my brother, you're ill, for God's sake. Let me take you to bed.”

  “For whose sake?” Nastagio raved. “God's? Or that of the Antichrist, Lorenzo?”

  “Saint Luke, help us,” Antonio murmured, covering his face with his hands.

  With the sheer force of his will, Guid'Antonio kept his fingers from the hilt of his dagger. He rose steadily, his gaze fixed on his lifelong friend. “Nastagio.” The word was a stone in his mouth. “Kinsman or no, from this time forward you will curb your tongue in my presence, lest I cut it out. I will not wink at treason. Nor will I tolerate slander of any kind, certainly not when a lady is involved, no matter who she is, whether Ippolita Sforza, Lucrezia Donati Ardinghelli, or however obliquely, my own spouse.”

  He shot a withering glance around the table. “Brother Giorgio, lest you forget, we're in conflict with Holy Mother Church because Pope Sixtus IV has declared himself the enemy of Lorenzo, and so, of the Florentine State. Moreover, Sixtus refuses to lift his censures against us not because he's the Vicar of Christ, but because he's the vicar of his bastard nephew.”

  Before they had further opportunity to speak, Guid'Antonio was out of the suffocating chamber and striding forth across the city to the Ox district in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence to find Maria.

  EIGHT

  She was seated a short distance from the hearth fire when he entered her mother's chamber in the Del Vigna residence. Bathed in the thick odors of incense and candle wax, the air in the modestly furnished room felt oppressively hot against his skin. In the raised bed, Alessandra del Vigna moaned beneath a woolen blanket, while her physician poked his finger in a pewter bowl's lumpy contents. Maria's eyes were closed, her hands limp in the lap of her gown and damask overdress. Surely, she would swelter in this heat meant to sweat the illness from the pores of her mother's skin. Still, the light from the hearth lent Maria's profile a lovely glow.

  Guid'Antonio's heart reached out to her. He would help her in the coming days, although for the most part, this duty Maria would perform alone. Her father, her brother, and her two sisters—all were dead from the plague that had ravaged the city in the months after Florence set its course for war. Guid'Antonio had watched her closely back then, while in her grief she drifted about the Vespucci Palace like a specter, her complexion deathly pale. She had eaten very little, becoming so airy and light, he had thought she might vanish before him. Eventually, her wounded soul had learned to live with its terrible loss; slowly, she had come back around. She had her mother to consider, after all. She had Giovanni, then just a boy of three. She had him. For a few months at least, until he and Amerigo packed their trunks and turned Flora and Bucephalus toward Paris.

  He removed his cloak and placed it on a chest. “Maria?”

  She started and turned a glance on him and almost at once, a smile eased her troubled features. She rose and hurried to the threshold to meet him. “Guid'Antonio.”

  He enfolded her in his arms, holding her so close, he could feel her heartbeat fluttering in her breast. Her body was solid and hot in his embrace, her clothing suffused with the heat of the hearth fire. “How is she?” he said.

  Maria's trembling sigh as she took a step back told him everything. She lifted her hair, letting it fan, black and shiny as onyx, around her shoulders. “God knows, Guid'Antonio. Two days ago, when Giovanni and I came visiting, she seemed herself. Now, the pains in her stomach are fearsome; you see how she braces against them. She's so cold, her teeth chatter, yet here it is July and a fire blazing in the hearth. Dottore Camerlini bled her. If only she could sleep.”

  As if determined not to give herself over to death, Mona Alessandra del Vigna thrashed beneath the cross on the wall behind her bed. Sleep she will, and the sooner the better, for her own sake, Guid'Antonio thought.

  He buried his face in the smoky fragrance of Maria's hair, brushing his lips against her neck. The contact of his mouth on her flesh hit him hard, like a fist blow to the heart. He wanted to pull her dress down around her shoulders and kiss her nipples till they were rosy and tight. He wanted to fall down on his knees, bunch up her skirt and run his hands up her parted thighs. Quickly, he released her. Such thoughts, at this time and place.

  “Guid'Antonio.” A note of worry suffused Maria's voice. “Forgive me for this morning. The devil's own disappointment put those harsh words in my mouth. I have no right—what must you have thought when you returned from the Signoria to find me gone?”

  His heartbeat slowed. Honor told him to take a step back and confess the truth: he had left her waiting, or so he had thought. Self-preservation reminded him fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Fresh starts, new beginnings. “Hush,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, “there's nothing to forgive. If there were, it would be you who should forgive me.”

  A series of coughs racked Mona Alessandra's body. Maria glanced toward the bed. “Bless you, Guid'Antonio, and God help her. I can't leave her tonight.” She gazed at him, her eyes dark pools of sorrow, all her energy spent.

  “No. Of course not.” He ran his hands down the long sleeves of her gown: beneath the silk fabric, her arms felt warm to the touch. He suppressed a groan. God, he wanted her in bed. Or here, against the hot wall.

  Beside the bed, Dottore Camerlini dumped the contents of the sick bowl into Alessandra del Vigna's chamber pot and turned to consult a well-thumbed manuscript. To what end? Maria's mother would die from this sickness that announced itself with sharp twinges in the belly before erupting into fever, chills, and stabbing pain. Guid'Antonio knew it. Maria knew it. Mona Alessandra del Vigna's physician, Dottore Camerlini, knew it. “I'll sit with you tonight,” Guid'Antonio said.

  But Maria shook her head. “Go home and rest. Soon enough, I'll need all your strength.”

  “Come outside with me?” he said.

  In the shadows of the Del Vigna garden, he inhaled deeply, pulling fresh air into his chest, standing with his wife in the shelter of the loggia in his crimson cloak. Night was upon them now in earnest, the only sound that of their soft breathing. Over the Santa Croce quarter, the moon raced in and out of purple clouds so thick with rain, they appeared about to burst. The fire in the torches burning around the little courtyard danced restlessly, illuminating stone walls caked with grime and soot. The Del Vigna garden showed other signs of neglect, a terracotta vase cracked open by the snow and ice of the past two winters, the bowl in the fountain dry and peeling.

  Maria touched his arm. “I haven't had time to do much here, with tending to Giovanni and other matters at home, and I don't like calling on Antonio. His hands are full as it is.”

  “I'll send our gardeners here tomorrow,” he said.

  Large raindrops splattered the ground and the dusty fountain. She said, “Do you expect good weather then? It looks as if a storm might unleash itself on us any moment now.”

  He drew his finger along her cheek. “I expect nothing, Maria. I only hope,” he said, and once more he strode, a solitary figure, out into the night.

  Few sensible men tr
aveled the streets of Florence alone after nightfall. But when had Guid'Antonio Vespucci ever been sensible? He unlatched the garden gate and stepped out into Piazza Santa Croce. The sound of the grating iron bolt echoed around the shuttered wooden houses and shops hugging the deserted square. Droplets of rain pelted his face and hair.

  Eastward across the piazza, at the end of the great rectangle, Santa Croce Church rose up in the night. Behind that unadorned brick facade, friars devoted to Saint Francis moved through shadows past private family chapels rich with frescoes painted by Gaddi, Giotto, and Aretino. Guid'Antonio pulled his cloak close around his face and peered through the darkness. A small brick dome rose up past the wall on the eastern side of the monastery's first cloister: the Pazzi family chapel.

  The Pazzis hadn't used the chapel in the last couple of years, had they, though God knew they had needed it. All, all had been trapped in the punishing violence unleashed in the city the instant Giuliano de' Medici's knees hit the Cathedral floor. All butchered, beheaded, castrated, hanged, their corpses tossed in the Arno in bloody pieces. All but a few, one of them Bianca de' Medici's husband, Guglielmo de' Pazzi, because he was Giuliano and Lorenzo's friend, had partied and traveled and gone hunting with them on numerous occasions. Amazing.

  The wind picked up. Straw and litter whirled outside the darkened shops as the misting rain gathered strength and threatened to come down in sheets. Guid'Antonio hurried into the piazza and drew up short, startled by the sharp burst of white light illuminating the atmosphere. He stopped, startled, watching as glistening crystals of pure white snow cascaded from the sky above his head. Out into the wintry light rode Giuliano in body armor shining like silver. Beneath him, his horse pranced, anticipating the joust. In the stands, bundled in a fur-lined cloak, sat Giuliano's tournament Queen of Beauty, Guid'Antonio's kinswoman, sixteen-year-old Simonetta Vespucci, her cheeks pink and as soft as roses. On Giuliano's banner, Sandro Botticelli had painted Simonetta's image, her cascading blonde hair braided with jewels and pearls, her sheer white gown caressing her voluptuous body.

  Guid'Antonio's heart pounded dully as Giuliano's tournament slowly faded from his vision. January 1475. Oh, how he yearned to hold on to that glorious winter morning! Perhaps he should see Dottore Camerlini. A mirthless laugh escaped his lips.

  Head bowed, hands shaking, he strode out into the rain. How could they all have been so mad as not to realize they were living in a dream, a bubble whose shape and colors constantly changed, one so fragile, neither prayers nor magic could keep it from bursting? Not long after the tournament, Guid'Antonio had walked with Giuliano behind Simonetta Vespucci's casket as tears flowed unashamedly down Giuliano's cheeks. Death—life!—spared no one, not even the young and impossibly beautiful, not when it came to a sickness in the chest or an assassin's blade.

  As was their duty and privilege, Simonetta's husband and her father-in-law, Marco and Piero Vespucci, had also walked in the funeral procession that day. Directly behind them, Guid'Antonio had forced himself to plant one foot solidly in front of the other and keep an even pace. All Florence knew Simonetta and Giuliano had been lovers, though Giuliano de' Medici and Marco Vespucci were lifelong friends.

  Black thoughts. Haunting memories.

  He moved along the western edge of Piazza Santa Croce and bore left into a crooked lane. Torches in doorways bloomed hesitantly as he passed. A cat slipped into the darkness ahead of him and vanished. Good! Thank God the bony feline hadn't whirled and come bounding back past him, made skittish by some waiting presence. He slowed his step, listening before quitting the tight byway, and heard nothing but the patter of rain.

  Out in the open again, he stayed close by the walls of the Stinche. Briefly, he paused and craned his head. The city prison was a massive structure with barred windows cut up so high that from the street they were invisible. Gloomy and stark, the Stinche housed traitors, murderers, and thieves. The list of traitors included Simonetta Vespucci's father-in-law, Piero Vespucci.

  A ghost walked across Guid'Antonio's grave. Somewhere in the Stinche, Piero Vespucci sat cuffed and chained. Guid'Antonio quickened his pace, his cheeks smarting with fury and shame. On the day after Giuliano's funeral Mass, Lorenzo and Palla Palmieri had questioned Guid'Antonio, informally, just outside the doors of San Lorenzo Church, where he had gone to pray. The two men had come striding toward him from the courtyard of the Medici garden, exuding an air of grave purpose, daggers in full view. “We found you,” Lorenzo had said with the new, dangerous edge he had acquired in the five days since his brother's murder. “Palla has made another arrest.” That Lorenzo meant an arrest having to do with the Pazzi Conspiracy was plain.

  “Good. Who?” Guid'Antonio said, keenly aware of Palla's mix of bravado and uneasiness, how he bit his lip and glanced toward the marketplace. Palla, who always met even the direst situations directly, if not exactly without guile, in his role as Florence's police chief.

  “Piero Vespucci,” Lorenzo said. “Your kinsman.”

  “Piero? Why?” Guid'Antonio's surprise was complete. No deception, no subterfuge.

  “For sheltering a man suspected in the plot against the Medici family,” Palla said. “Piero gave the fool refuge.”

  Suspected. It was enough to ruin the family. “Which fool? I thought we hanged most everyone.”

  “Napoleone Francesi.”

  “Who escaped justice, thanks to your Piero.” Lorenzo's voice was dangerously quiet, revealing no emotion.

  “I don't know this Napoleone Francesi,” Guid'Antonio said, holding out both hands.

  “No?” Lorenzo's eyes shone.

  “No. And Piero's not mine. I barely know him.”

  Lorenzo touched the bandage protecting the flesh wound at his neck, as if reassuring himself the dressing was still there. “I told Palla so.”

  “You had no inkling Piero Vespucci might be connected to a plot to kill Lorenzo and Giuliano?” Palla said, relief creeping into his voice.

  “No.”

  “Nor Marco?”

  “Marco? Did he shelter a suspect, too?” Guid'Antonio said.

  A smile twitched Palla's lips. “Not so far as we know. However . . .” He shrugged. Like father, like son.

  “What will you do with them?” Guid'Antonio said. No need to inquire about motive. Simonetta Vespucci's image stood between them in Piazza San Lorenzo as surely as if she still drew breath in this earthly realm.

  “We'll see what we can learn and proceed accordingly.” Palla smiled wickedly. “Or vice versa.”

  “Where are Piero and Marco now?”

  “Police headquarters. Piero's there, that is. My men have gone to fetch Marco from home.”

  “Pray you find him there,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “I'll find him wherever he goes.”

  The three men strolled across the marketplace together then, their backs to the church where Giuliano's corpse lay lost in darkness within a marble sarcophagus whose gleaming surface was lit by a burning sea of candles. It was six months later, in October, when Guid'Antonio and Amerigo set out for France, riding beneath the banner of Lorenzo's trust, while Marco Vespucci lived in exile, and Piero moldered behind the walls of the Stinche, his world a stinking river of black.

  He stepped over a rushing stream of rainwater and sewage, veering toward Via dei Cartolai, where the booksellers, stationers, and illustrators dwelled. Thunder crashed overhead. Lightning turned the rain to silver needles, and the wind picked up, blowing Guid'Antonio's cloak back from his shoulders. Christ's blood. Was he forever to be pursued by tempestuous weather?

  He cut through a black alley, shouldering wet walls, ignoring rats scattering at his feet. It was then a muffled footstep sounded at his back. He spun around, the hairs stiff on the nape of his neck. He strained his ears and heard the rain streaming in rivulets down the walls enclosing him all around.

  Alarmed, at Piazza della Signoria, he walked straight out into the rain. The rain was a forceful downpour now, beating against his face.
He touched the dagger inside his sodden cloak, sliding his fingers through the narrow slit, and glanced around. City Hall rose up on his left; across from it loomed the Loggia dei Priori, the covered area where Florence's nine Lord Priors received visiting ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries. In the shadows, with rain dripping down their legs, arms, and torsos, the loggia's collection of ancient statues looked oddly menacing.

  He could dash past the loggia, sprint toward the river, and bear sharply right, toward Borg'Ognissanti. No! At night the area around the Arno housed ruffians who might be tempted to cut his throat and steal his purse, desperate for a few coins. Better to cut diagonally across Piazza della Signoria and test Fortune in the alleyways. The darkness that hid one man could as well hide another.

  He had walked only a few paces out onto the open when the sound of movement pricked his ears again. He spun around and saw—nothing! He walked on, his heart galloping, keeping to the relative safety of the broad, open piazza, his mind preternaturally alert. Lightning cracked and flashed overhead; for one instant night turned into day. Grim and fearful, he maintained his pace. Before him on the lip of the piazza there lay a yawning black corridor.

  He walked inside and turned to look back across the piazza. If someone was out there, he was clinging to the shadows. Perhaps his companion had given up the chase on this rain-soaked night. Somewhere in the sleeping neighborhood a baby cried, unsettling his nerves again.

  He passed through one short byway after another, retracing the route he and Amerigo had followed on their way to City Hall earlier today, until finally he passed beneath the sopping-wet scarlet flags adorning Palazzo Davizzi. He unlatched the red gate, dropped the wooden arm into place, and stepped into Piazza Trinita.

  God's mercy, the rain had all but stopped, the storm reeling off into the countryside. Trinita Church was a welcome sight, though dark and lonely as the grave. On his left, Ponte Trinita spanned the river to the opposite bank. Both piazza and bridge were deserted. At his back, he heard the sound of the latch lifted from the gate. Jesus Christ and Mary! Alarmed, he spun on his heel. “Show your face! Come out!”