Signora Da Vinci (31 page)

To his left were two smaller tables, upon the first of which was spread open his folio and some pieces of red and black chalk. On the other was a row of metal knives and clamps and saws.

A kerchief that must have covered his nose and mouth was knotted at the back in his long wavy hair. He worked with such rapt concentration he did not hear the loud creak of the heavy door.

“Son,” I said, and he turned with a start.

He looked beyond me into the deserted hallway. “Mama,” he said and smiled awkwardly. “I would say, ‘Welcome, come in,’ but”—he gestured helplessly at the body before him. “You should close that door.”

“Is it awful?” I asked, doing as he told me.

“No,” he said. “It’s . . . breathtaking.”

In his satchel he searched for and found another kerchief and a small vial. He sprinkled a few drops from the vial onto the cloth, and even through the stench I could smell lavender oil. He handed it to me, and I placed it around my face. A saving grace, I thought. The way such onerous work was possible.

He gestured me forward to the corpse’s feet. I fully expected a gruesome dissection, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of a fully pregnant woman, her great belly flayed open, her womb parted and the child within lying in deathly peaceful repose.

I failed to stifle my gasp. Never in a thousand years could I have imagined such a thing. Far from being speechless, I recovered quickly and became a fountain of questions.
How did she die? How old is the fetus? Is this the placenta? Where is the umbilicus? Is it male or female?

Leonardo patiently began to explain, unflinching, as he touched the miniature limbs, moving them aside with the tenderest care to reveal the genitals.

“Big
cazzo
for a little man,” he quietly joked, trying to put me at ease. “Can you see the fingernails? They’re so tiny.” His voice was filled with wonder. He turned suddenly to his folio and with red chalk filled in a missed detail in several sketches of the fetus.

I looked closer and I could see the plastered-down tendrils of silky hair.

I burst into tears and turned away, pulling off my mask.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” Leonardo gently said, coming to my side and removing the kerchief from his own face.

“Why am I weeping?”

“Dead children always make you weep.”

“I suppose they do. Leonardo,” I began, allowing my eyes to fall on the corpses of mother and child.

“You don’t have to say it. I know this is madness.”

“And done so carelessly.” I knew my voice was becoming shrill. “One question to the boys at the bottega and this is where I was led. The Office of Night let you slip through their fingers once. A second arrest for necromancy . . .” I shook my head. “The best Medici lawyers will not save you from that.”

“But how else can I learn? How do I study the physical nature of man?” he asked with almost childlike sincerity. “How muscles make limbs move? Cause expressions in the face? The few men who teach anatomy ignore what they see before their eyes and instead spout off verbatim what has already been taught and written by the Greeks and Romans. Why bother doing dissections at all?” He was growing more passionate. “Experience is
everything
!”

“My darling boy,” I began, but he was on fire now, hardly hearing me.

“In another cadaver I found a tree of nerves that descends from the brain and the nape of the neck, stretching along the spine and into the arms and legs! On that same body I dissected the hand. I was not content to see the structure but wished to understand its
workings
, so I took threads and wires and used them to replace the muscles. When I pulled on them, they moved the fingers!”

I was silent, but my expression must have been drawn with concern.

“Mama, please, you must be happy for me. I know it is all grotesque, but it is marvelous beyond compare!”

“I am happy for you,” I said most unconvincingly. “But do you spend all your time here, with the dead? What of your friends? Have you a lover?”

He looked away as he spoke and though the words were chilly, his voice was turgid with feeling. “Love is a hell of which fools make their heaven. It is poison with a sweet taste. A death having the appearance of life.”

I knew he was quoting Petrarch, but I let him go on.

“And lust? It slows the intellect, and all that comes of it are disappointment and sorrow.” His voice trembled. “Those who do not restrain their appetites . . . place themselves on the same level with beasts.”

“Leonardo . . .” My voice was pleading. “You’ve been wounded by the church. . . .”

“Damn the church!” he cried, wheeling around to face me.

I placed a hand over his mouth and begged his silence. He placed a hand over mine and, curling my fingers into a fist, kissed them and brought them to his heart.

“I’m all right, Mama. This is enough for me now. More than enough. And I’ll be careful.”

“You always say that.”

He smiled. “You’d better go. I don’t have much time here before they . . .” He looked down at his dissected subjects.

“I understand,” I said quickly and made for the door, turning back before I opened it. “Come visit me, will you?”

He tied on his mask and turned back to the mother and child. “If you make me a vegetable stew,” he said.

CHAPTER 22

I was no longer a stranger to the sumptuous sleeping chambers of the Medici brothers. Many nights we would gather—the family friends or sometimes the Academy fellows—sprawling across the canopied bed, perched on chests or sitting amidst pillows on the carpeted floor to drink wine, play musical instruments, and sing. We would listen to Lorenzo or Poliziano’s or Gigi Pulci’s newest verses and hurl good-natured insults as well as abundant praise in their direction . . . or simply talk, as men do, into the wee hours of the morning.

This time it was different. It was the Sunday afternoon before Ascension Day and we were dressed for church and gathered in Giuliano’s room. He was in bed, laid up with a leg not yet healed of a fall from Simonetta, who had reared up at the sight of a snake in the road. My poultices had almost finished their work on the gash across his thigh, but a cracked rib had punctured a lung, and his breathing continued pained and shallow.

Still, on this day, he wished desperately to be joining his brother and their friends at the Duomo.

“You must rest, Giuliano,” Lorenzo ordered him tiredly, for he had said this a hundred times already.

“I don’t want to rest anymore. I’ve already missed the banquet for Raffaele, and now I’m going to miss the sight of beautiful young ladies in their church finery. Silio, hand me my blue doublet.”

“No,” Ficino answered simply. “You’re staying in bed. Your mother is worried about you.”

Giuliano sulked. “And tell me again why we are bothering to pay for an expensive celebration of a seventeen-year-old brat?”

“Because the brat is a beloved nephew of our
dearest
Holy Father, and he has just been made a cardinal. Angelo,” Lorenzo said to Poliziano, “why don’t you go see how he is progressing?”

The pope’s nephew, Raffaele Sansoni, was even now down the hall in the Medici salon, changing into his vestments for his first public appearance at the cathedral.

As Poliziano sauntered out of Giuliano’s room, he muttered so we all could hear, “For once I agree with Giuliano.”

Lorenzo looked thoughtful. He had been angry at Pope Sixtus’s treatment of the family, recently handing the Medici control of the Curia’s finances over to the rival Pazzi bank. It was all part of Rome’s greater plan, Lorenzo was sure, to take control of the far too independent Florence.

“Things
have
been different since Sforza’s assassination,” he said, almost to himself. Lorenzo referred to Galeazzo, the much-reviled Duke of Milan, who had been, if not Lorenzo’s friend, the strongest of Florence’s allies in the north. “Sixtus believes that now with an eight-year-old boy as duke and a female regent governing him, Milan is in total disarray, and Florence therefore weakened.”

“You think the pope’s spies don’t know you are playing both sides of Milan?” Ficino asked.

“What? That I am giving Bona and her young son support at the same time I’m offering friendship to the boy’s uncle?” Lorenzo laughed bitterly. “The Vatican spies know
everything
.”

I had never busied myself with politics, but Lorenzo had, of late, been consumed with the subterfuge swirling through the courts of Rome, Milan, and Naples, for the downfall or survival of Florence was at stake . . . and the sovereignty of Italy itself. He spoke freely of these matters with all of his close friends.

The boy’s uncle of whom Lorenzo spoke was Ludovico Sforza, the most ambitious of Galeazzo’s five ambitious brothers. Ludovico, now known by all as
Il Moro
, the Moor, had been sent into exile by the widowed Bona, she fearing that his naked desire to wrest control from her son was greater, by far, than all his uncles’ combined.

Had Lorenzo to choose,
Il Moro
would become Milan’s next ruler. They were friends, and the man would prove an ally as strong as Galeazzo had been.

“Give Lorenzo a little credit here,” Sandro Botticelli insisted. “He knows a thing or two about diplomacy. If he thinks it is a good idea to entertain the pope’s nephew—he
is
rather a beautiful boy. . . .”

Giuliano punched Botticelli in the arm, and the artist jostled his friend in such rough play that the bedridden Giuliano groaned in pain.

“Then I say we show him a good time,” Botticelli finished.

The door opened and Ficino returned. “He’s ready.”

Botticelli stepped forward and smiled lasciviously. “I like a man in a red dress.”

Everyone laughed and moved to the door. I stayed behind at Giuliano’s bedside.

“I’ll change your dressing when we get back,” I told him.

“Good man, Cato,” he said, smiling up at me.

I went to join the others.

 

Raffaele Sansoni was indeed a handsome young man with the earnest expression of the scholar he had, until recently, been. He’d studied at Lorenzo’s new University of Pisa and looked far too young to be wearing the red cardinal’s robes and skullcap. We surrounded him now as we made the brisk four-minute walk from the Palazzo Medici to the Duomo, keeping the conversation cheerful, for the boy was clearly nervous about his first official High Mass in the great Cathedral of Florence.

With throngs of worshippers coming from every side, we were nearing the immense front doors when nature called in so urgent a way that I had no time to announce my separation from the group, and slipped into the alleyway beside the Duomo. With the horn I did my business, then leaned back against the wall. I had never lost the distaste I felt for the inside of a church, and now I wondered if I could take my leave unnoticed, later making apologies to Lorenzo. I stayed a few minutes more, ruminating whether my distaste for the institution was stronger than my affection for Lorenzo. He so enjoyed his friends around him at a public occasion.

I decided, with a sigh, to go in, and thus stepped from the alley into the street. My attention was immediately drawn by male laughter coming from Via Larga, the direction from which we had, only moments before, arrived.

It startled me to see Giuliano limping along, flanked by two men, one of whom I recognized as Francesco Pazzi. The other I did not know. They were draped in a friendly way over Giuliano. Pazzi appeared to be tickling him.

Something was vaguely unsettling about the scene. Giuliano should have been in bed, I thought. And Francesco Pazzi seemed far too familiar with him, kin by marriage though he was. I tried quieting the voice inside. My mothering instincts were getting the better of me, I decided. I steeled myself and, turning, stepped through the tall, magnificent doors of the cathedral.

The mass had already begun.

I could see above the hordes of the faithful, standing crushed shoulder to shoulder, that young Cardinal Sansoni had been successfully delivered to his place on the high altar. Lorenzo and his friends were near to the ambulatory at the north end of the choir, quietly respectful of the gaudy ritual being played out before them.

I turned, hoping to see Giuliano enter, and was relieved when he did come in, alone, to take a place at the south end of the choir.

The priest had given the honor of elevating the host to the visiting cardinal. When Raffaele lifted his arms and intoned,
“Hoc est enim corpus meum,”
the sacristy bell began chiming. At that, men doffed their caps, and to the sound of many thousands of rustling garments, the entire congregation of the faithful fell to their knees.

Once again something in me rebelled against the sanctimonious-ness of the place, and I hesitated kneeling for the briefest moment. In that very instant I saw from the corner of my eye a tiny flash of light, and turned to look behind me.

I saw Giuliano quite clearly, for he, too, was still upright . . . but the expression on his face was something terrible. A moment later I saw the flash for what it was—sunlight glinting off Francesco Pazzi’s sword as it fell through the air above Giuliano de’ Medici’s head. Other men had descended like a pack of ravenous wolves and were stabbing him again and again.

I shouted “No!” but my voice was drowned amidst shrieks of pain and outrage now coming from the
front
of the choir, near the high altar.

I pushed through the chaotic crowd and saw a glimpse of him. The sight was strange to my eye, for his neck was bloodied, and with his cloak wrapped clear round his arm he was fending off dagger blows from a brown-robed priest!

Angelo Poliziano appeared from behind and sank his own blade into the friar’s back. Lorenzo drew his sword as Botticelli, Ficino, and other friends surrounded him.