Signora Da Vinci (8 page)

“What have
you
got to be sorry for?” It surprised me, finding my voice. Its bitterness surprised me even more.

“It’s a terrible thing, taking the boy like they did. But even more terrible . . .” He stopped again, now having uttered those frightening words.

“What is more terrible, Francesco? Tell me!”

“The child won’t suckle. He refuses the teat.”

“Who is the wetnurse?” I demanded, throwing off the covers and swinging my legs out of bed.

“Angelina Lucchasi. She’s a good woman, and trying very hard, but the boy . . .”

“Leonardo,”
I whispered fiercely. “Call him by his name.”

Francesco looked as though he would himself cry. He put his hand to his forehead and squeezed his temples. “Leonardo is suffering. He is starving. If he does not eat . . .”

“What is his father doing about this?!” I shouted. I stood, but my weak legs would not hold. Francesco lurched toward me and helped me back onto the bed. I was gripping his hands with fingers like vises.

Now tears were coming down Francesco’s face. “Piero does nothing. He says that soon Leonardo will become so hungry he will take the nipple. Grow fat as a piglet. But what if he doesn’t? Caterina, you must do something!”

I think my mouth was agape—with horror, with loathing, with utter confusion. “What can
I
do?” I cried, pounding Francesco’s chest. He was stoic, as though believing he deserved even more punishment.

“You must come home with me. Now. Come to our house and offer yourself as Leonardo’s wetnurse.”

The words were so unexpected, so unimaginable and yet so perfectly sensible. For a moment I envisioned the scene as I stood before the family, felt the heat of my humiliation, and desperation for their acceptance.

Then the image vanished. There was not a moment to spare. “Go,” I said to Francesco. “I need to get dressed. You wait downstairs. Send up my father and my aunt.”

Finally he smiled, and for the first time I remember thinking that there was one good man in an otherwise despicable family.

So I went with Francesco, he quaking in his heart as much as I was. They could easily turn me away, call my suggestion the ravings of a madwoman. But this young man had to live on with them and their scorn. Would he be thought a traitor? Some low coward siding with the enemy?

He unlatched the back gate and we passed through the yard I’d seen for the first time from over the wall in the branches of an olive tree. There was even less happening than on that summer day the year before. Above the unnaturally loud buzz of a hundred flies at a pile of dung, I could hear from inside the house the sound of Leonardo’s wailing. But now, to my dismay, I realized his voice was weaker, almost gasping. Suddenly my bodice was wet, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying.

“Hurry!” I said to Francesco, who took my arm and picked up his pace.

I knew I could not afford to weep before the da Vinci men. Neither could I appear too strong, for that would certainly offend them
. Oh, how would I know what to do, what to say?
I was fifteen years old and had nothing to guide me but the love of my son.

When Francesco stood aside, leaving me framed in the archway of the da Vincis’ dining room, my arms crossed protectively across my chest, I think that despite my previous imaginings of this very moment, I was as stunned at the sight of them as they were of me.

Piero and his wife, Albiera, were there, side by side. She was a girl no older than me with a long, narrow face and little flesh on her bones. Piero’s father, Antonio, sat at one end of the long polished table, his wife, Lucia, at the other. Piero’s elderly grandfather, who stared at me with loathing, was seated at an empty place that was certainly Francesco’s.

Momentous as this scene was, something greater had gripped my attention. Leonardo’s cries were closer now, in a room just above us. I knew I should address Piero and his father, but each time I opened my mouth to speak, another mournful howl or hiccupping whimper closed it again. Antonio raised his chin to his wife and stepdaughter, and without another word they stood obediently and pushed back their chairs.

But I wanted them to see this, hear this. They were women as I was, and should understand the need that had brought me, like an invader, into their home. Antonio was waving them out of the room, but I determined that they would not leave until I had said my piece.

“Look at me!” I shouted and flung my arms wide. My bodice was soaking wet with milk. I glared at Piero. “Listen to our son!”

Standing beside him, Albiera winced, but I had more to say.

“Leonardo is crying out for
me
. I am here. He needs to be fed. You must let me feed him!”

Antonio sat rigid, his jaws grinding. He refused to meet Piero’s pleading stare.

“Take this whore out of here, Francesco,” the older man growled.

“Just let her speak, Grandfather,” the boy begged, his voice trembling.

“Give us a room in the attic,” I said. “Anywhere. We’ll be no bother to anyone.” Still no one spoke. “Please, may I see him now?”

“How do you dare come into our home in such a rude manner?” Antonio snarled at me. I could see in that moment how the man would frighten even his sons. “You deeply offend my father, me, and my wife, and you disrespect my son’s new bride.”

“I will stop him crying,” I said directly to Piero, dangerously ignoring the senior men of this family. “Isn’t that what you want?”

Piero was trembling with an answer that he, in his cowardice, could not speak.

Finally I addressed Antonio and his father, conquering my fear of them with simple truth.

“Leonardo is Piero’s blood. Your blood. Do you want your first grandson to die? For he will die without me.” The words were tumbling from me effortlessly now. They were appropriately accompanied by a fresh round of Leonardo’s wailing. “I am his mother. Those cries . . . they are his call to me.” I pressed my palm to my milk-wet bodice. “These are my cries for
him
!”

The two wives, far from understanding my womanly pleas, looked wholly scandalized. But Antonio’s overblown hubris had finally been pricked by my words.

“You will live as the other servants,” he commanded me, not daring to meet his father’s eyes. “You will speak to no one in the family unless you are spoken to first.”

I could see the older man spluttering, speechless with rage at his son’s decision.

I swallowed hard. This was to be more demeaning than I had imagined.

“You will—”

“What if I need something for Leonardo, or if he is—”

“Are you deaf, young woman!” Antonio thundered, clearly unused to a woman’s defiance. “I have told you never to speak first!”

I remember feeling the stone floor under my slippers, and a kind of earthly strength that rose through my feet and legs and straightened my spine. I knew I was about to suffer a long and terrible indignity, but I would first have my say.

“If all is well with my son,” I pressed on, “I will have nothing to say to you, signors.” I looked at Piero. “Or you.” I briefly lowered my eyes, acknowledging the women of the house, then went on. “But if he should take ill, or have need of this family in any way, I will speak to anyone I please about it.” I looked at Antonio again. “I am your grandson’s wetnurse now, a servant in your house. But I am not your slave.”

Antonio looked indignant, ready to lash out at the impudent girl standing in his dining room.

Before he could speak again, I added, “I want to see my boy. Please.”

That was how it was decided.

I was taken upstairs to a fine bedchamber, where Signora Lucchasi was rocking my red-faced, squalling infant in a wooden cradle. He looked drawn and miserable, so unlike the peaceful, beautiful newborn I’d held just a few days before.

The woman, shocked as she was by my appearance, gratefully stood back and allowed me to lift Leonardo from the crib.

It took only a moment for him to recognize my touch, my smell, the sound of my voice crooning his name. As I laid him on the great bed and loosened the tight swaddling blanket that imprisoned his tiny body, the choked sobs ceased. I touched his face, all of his limbs, and stroked his heaving chest with two fingers, making a tiny circle around his heart.

I lifted him into my arms again and, finding a high-backed chair, sat down and opened my dress. He needed no help finding my breast, and weak as he was, began to suckle noisily and ferociously as he had done before. He blew a sigh of contentment through his nostrils and fed that way for some minutes. Finally I felt his tiny muscles relax into me, and he rolled away from the feeding. Then, like a miracle, he turned his head and opened his eyes. He saw me. Saw his mother for the first time. He never blinked, just took in the sight.

I smiled quickly, determined that the first human expression he would ever know would be one of happiness. Then his hunger forced him back to the teat. I sighed, heavy with relief and joy, cradled down to kiss the top of his head and closed my eyes. It was only then that I felt his tiny, warm hand on my cheek, resting there light and comfortable and infinitely possessive.

I thought my heart would burst with the grace and beauty of the gesture.
Leonardo. He was mine again, and I was his
. And I swore in that moment to every god that would listen and all the Fates I could defy, that nothing would ever hurt my child, and that we would never be parted again.

CHAPTER 4

The time I spent as my son’s wetnurse in the home of Piero’s father and grandfather, with the man I had loved, and his wife, who treated me like the lowest of servants, was difficult in the extreme. Leonardo and I lived in a portion of the barn made into a crude residence, with the smell of cattle dung infusing everything around us every hour of the day and night. We were ignored, by and large, by the da Vincis, except for disdainful glances or, if I insisted on something for Leonardo’s well-being, the briefest of conversations.

They pretended generosity by allowing me every Sunday off, but would not permit me to take Leonardo when I went to see Papa. My visits were therefore cut cruelly short, as I missed him painfully, but how could I deprive my son of his feedings?

Thankfully my milk seemed to satisfy him, and kept him healthy. He fell victim to none of the illnesses of childhood, and developed the sweetest and happiest temperament. Truly, we needed this rude family not at all. My son and I were inseparable and full of joy in each other’s company.

He never failed to delight and surprise me with his cleverness. He took his first steps—though no one ever believed me—at six months. It took longer than usual for him to speak, but when he did—he was almost two—there was no silencing him. He learned how to question first. And question he did

“What is this?” “What is that?” “Why?” Endlessly. He needed only to be answered once. Then the name of the flower or bird or insect or object was permanently sealed in his head.

I would see him sitting in the yard staring for the longest time at a grasshopper climbing a stalk of grass. I could swear he was
studying
it, as my father would study the sediment left in the bottom of one of his beakers. Then would come the two-year-old’s questions and observations. A barrage of them. “Why he green?” “He eats leaf.” Then a squeal of delight. “He cleans leg!” “Why so long leg?”

It surprised me at first that although he loved living creatures, Leonardo was not unduly disturbed if they died. He was simply fascinated with them in their dead state and took great pleasure in touching and examining them, in endless sessions in his tiny dexterous fingers, simply happy they were not squirming away or biting him.

It seemed that this time was more difficult for Piero than it was for me, as I had Leonardo. For Leonardo’s part, he hardly realized that the man was his father, or that he needed anything more than an adoring mother.

The only light in the family was Francesco. He was the kindest young man I had ever known. I sometimes thought he could not possibly share the same blood with the others, so different was he. Francesco would visit with us in the barn, sneaking us treats from the kitchen, or fashioning small toys for Leonardo out of wood, some of them that moved. These, in particular, were engrossing for Leonardo, who fixed on them as if they were one of his insects, lacking the living spark but nevertheless something to observe and manipulate.

Francesco would, on a pleasant morning on his way to the fields and herds he oversaw, come and ask me if he might bring my boy with him for the day, promising to take good care of all his needs. I’d watch them as they disappeared out the back gate into the olive orchard, Leonardo riding on “Unca Cecco’s” shoulders or slung like a small sack of grain under one arm, Leonardo always giggling or squealing with delight in his uncle’s company. It was clear as a winter night that Piero’s brother wished Leonardo had been
his
son, and was repenting of his horrid family’s sins by his loving ways.

To me, Francesco was a sweet brother, a blessing I had never known growing up. It rarely occurred to me that, close as we had become, the handsome young man never made a romantic advance on a pretty young woman. Occasionally I remembered what Piero had said about Francesco being a “Florenzer,” a man who loved other men, but it seemed irrelevant. A friend, a brother, a kind uncle. That was what mattered.

One cold winter evening as Leonardo slept in his hammock, Francesco had sneaked into the barn with an extra armful of wood for our fire. He looked troubled as he coaxed a bit more heat into our little room, so I gently coaxed the truth from him.

“My brother’s become unbearable to live with,” he said. “He still longs for you so desperately. You know that, don’t you?” When I did not answer he went on. “Everyone in the house can see it.”

“Why did he do it?” I said. “Why did he promise to marry me when he knew it was impossible?”