The Falconer's Knot (5 page)

Isabella had hated her husband for so long it was second nature to her. The image of her first love still burned brightly in her memory after all these years – his dark brown eyes and slender hands, his sensitive mouth that had spoken such tender words and given her such passionate kisses. Ubaldo was not hideous or coarse but he was cold as the marble floor of the dining hall.

He treated her as a possession, not cruelly, but indifferently, after the first six months of their marriage, during which his passion had never once been rewarded with a spontaneous caress. He accepted that she would never love him and had long since ceased to have any feelings for her other than those of ownership. She was treated with the minimal politeness that her position as his wife merited. But he had a young mistress, not the first, and it was to her that he went to find the warmth lacking in his marriage bed.

Isabella gave thanks for the young mistresses, who had saved her from Ubaldo’s presence in her chamber for so many years. She was in her mid-thirties, still beautiful, her figure rounded only a little by the birth of her four children. They were at table with her now, two on each side, and she could at least look on them with pleasure. It had surprised her every time she gave birth to discover the force of the love she felt for children born out of such indifference. But the three sons and one daughter she had dutifully given her husband were the greatest source of pleasure in her life.

It was to the friary’s colour room that the Abbot took Silvano.

‘This is Brother Anselmo, our Colour Master,’ he said, introducing him to the friar Silvano already knew from meeting him in the stables, a middle-aged brown-haired man with an intelligent, bony face. ‘He too has only recently joined us at Giardinetto. But he ran a colour room in his previous house.’

Behind Brother Anselmo five other friars sat at a long table with slabs of stone in front of them. They were all grinding something, like cooks in a kitchen crushing spices.

But the colour room wasn’t full of pungent cooking aromas, delicious enough to bring water into the mouth. The smells were acrid and fairly unpleasant.

‘As we discussed, Brother,’ said the Abbot, ‘I am assigning young Silvano here to assist you with the pigments.’

‘Welcome,’ said Anselmo. ‘I shall be glad of another pair of hands.’ Silvano wondered if the Colour Master knew why he was there in the friary. Was it still only the Abbot and Brother Ranieri who knew he wasn’t a real novice but a suspected murderer?

‘You have joined us on an auspicious day,’ said Brother Anselmo. ‘We are to receive an honoured visitor today. The famous painter Simone Martini is coming to the colour room to inspect our work. And if we satisfy his high standards, he will order many pigments for his work in the Basilica of the Blessed Francis, our founder.’

The brothers looked up from their work on the wooden bench. The three real novices and two lay brothers were more interested in the impending arrival than that of a new novice. But by the end of the morning Silvano felt very much at home in the colour room. His hands were fine and dextrous, and the work of chopping, grinding and mixing was something he picked up easily.

It was indoor work though, which was frustrating. Thank goodness he had tomorrow’s hunt to look forward to.

‘Tell me everything you know about my son and that man’s wife,’ said Baron Montacuto.

Gervasio de’ Oddini stood before the Baron in the great hall his friend called home. Even as Gervasio cleared his throat and fiddled with the hat in his hand, he couldn’t help letting his gaze stray to the vast mantelpiece with the Montacuto arms above it, the brightly coloured tapestries of boar hunts and the heavy carved wooden chair in which the Baron sat to quiz him.

‘I know that Silvano was infatuated with her,’ he said hesitantly. ‘He wrote her a love poem.’

The Baron sank his grizzled head in his hands. ‘Poetry!’ his muffled voice said. ‘Where is that poem now?’ he asked, his voice suddenly clear again and his eyes raised bright to Gervasio’s face.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said the young man.

‘It could mean his death warrant if it fell into the wrong hands,’ said Montacuto. ‘If he had any sense, he would have burned it. But if he had any sense, he wouldn’t be in the mess he’s in now. See if you can find it, will you? Go to the man’s widow and see if she has it and get it off her. I don’t care what it takes.’

Gervasio’s mouth curled into a smile, quickly suppressed. Silvano’s father was issuing orders to him as if he were a servant rather than another member of a noble family, but the Baron was actually sending him to the beautiful Angelica, with his blessing! And all the while the poem was inside his own jerkin.

‘We all know my son didn’t do it,’ continued Montacuto. ‘This is killing his mother and sisters. They spend all day weeping over him. But it is far too dangerous for him to return.’

‘May I ask where he is, sir?’ asked Gervasio politely.

‘You may ask,’ snorted the Baron. ‘But you’ll excuse my not answering. Safest if no one knows who doesn’t have to.’

‘Welcome, Maestro!’ said Brother Anselmo. He had never seen any of Simone Martini’s paintings himself but the artist’s reputation was great all over Tuscany and Umbria. Rumour had it that he had just completed in Siena a Mary in Majesty so beautiful as almost to rival that of his old master Duccio in the Cathedral there. And Anselmo had seen that one of Duccio’s installed himself.

The painter walked among the friars and novices watching their hands deftly grinding minerals on their porphyry slabs. He was a slight figure, with a down-turned mouth that made him look as if he were sucking lemons, thought Silvano. But he was not a miserable man; far from it. His grey eyes held the spark of great intelligence and liveliness of imagination.

‘I brought with me to Assisi a great supply of colours,’ he said in a high, light voice. ‘But that was over a year ago and I am running out, in spite of the deliveries I’ve had from Siena since then. It would be very convenient to have a source of supply so near at hand.’

‘It would be an honour,’ said Brother Anselmo. ‘We can supply most pigments that you are likely to need, I think. May I ask exactly what you are working on?’

‘A chapel,’ said the painter, waving his arm in an arc from left to right. ‘I am telling the story of the life of Saint Martin on its walls. Fresco – the most difficult of all techniques. I have a workshop outside the Basilica where my journeymen mix the gesso for the walls. But they are not skilled in grinding pigments and I need them for humbler tasks like preparing the lime-white. And my assistants I need working with me on the frescoes if we are to be finished in time. We have been here many months already.’

Silvano racked his brains to recall something about Saint Martin but could not. Was there something about a cloak? Or was that Saint Francis himself? He couldn’t remember.

‘Rose,’ the painter was saying. ‘Purples, blues, greens. I shall need ochres, cinnabar, vermilion, green earth – but most importantly, I must have some ultramarine. Can you supply me?’

‘If you can provide the necessary lapis lazuli,’ said Brother Anselmo, and he and the painter might have been speaking a foreign language for all that Silvano understood. ‘But I’m sure you know how expensive it is.’

‘Money is not a problem,’ said the artist. ‘The late Cardinal Gentile has left me well supplied with soldi. I can get you the stone. But do your brothers have the skill to make the ultramarine – the true blue?’

His piercing eyes raked the group of lay brothers and novices and lingered for a moment on Silvano’s unshorn head.

‘I can teach them, Maestro,’ said Brother Anselmo.

Chiara had seen the false novice only once since he arrived, that day she dropped the herbs. Her cheeks burned to think of it, as they had then. Her knowledge of young men was very limited – and unlikely to become any more extensive now – but she had never seen any more pleasing to look on than the unconvincing brother in the house next door.

She asked Sister Cecilia, another novice, about him. But Cecilia was scandalised.

‘We do not look at the brothers,’ she whispered. ‘Only the new friar, Brother Anselmo, who comes here to hear confession and celebrate Mass. Before him it was Brother Filippo, but he’s too old and infirm now. And we know Father Bonsignore, of course. But we must never look at any of the younger brothers, particularly the novices like us who are not yet professed.’

‘But I’m sure that one is not a real novice,’ said Chiara. ‘He has a proper nobleman’s horse. And a hunting hawk! How can a friar, even a novice, have such worldly goods?’

Sister Cecilia shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine. But it is wrong for us to speculate. It is not our concern, Sister Orsola.’

So many things seemed no longer to be Chiara’s concern. Her world had never had very large horizons but now, within a week or so, it had shrunk to the little chapel, the sisters’ house and the garden of the convent in Giardinetto.

Still, there was also the colour room. She did like working with Sister Veronica. The work grinding the pigments was dull enough, but the bright colours that sprang out when the water was poured on to the powders in the jars made her catch her breath, and ever since her first day, she had loved the names of them.

‘Green earth,’ she would murmur, as they worked on the pigments. ‘Blood stone, cinnabar, red lake, death’s head purple.’ It was like a litany to her.

‘Sister Orsola,’ reprimanded Sister Veronica that afternoon. ‘Silence while you work. We have an important visitor coming to see us.’