The Poet Prince (37 page)

“My Colombina,” he whispered, as he kissed her neck and lost himself in the mass of her hair. Lorenzo began to recite to her from their sacred scripture, the Song of Songs, as he whispered in her ear. He needed the respite of their tradition, the only escape he ever found from the weight of his responsibilities. His mouth trailed kisses across her collarbone between the words: “How beautiful you are, my love. How beautiful you are. Your eyes are doves.” His voice caught on the words, so lost was he in the rawness of this night.

Colombina knew, as she always did, what a toll such responsibilities took on his poet’s heart. She knew that what had transpired in his marital bed had been more difficult for Lorenzo than it was for Clarice—infinitely more difficult. It would always be her own place as his beloved to allow him the freedom to release his most deeply held feelings and to escape within her. It was a role she cherished. She responded to the holy
song, holding Lorenzo to her as she sang the verse that spoke of spring and of renewal in her lilting, sensual voice:

Come then, my love,
For see, winter is past
The rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth
The season of glad songs has come,
The cooing of the dove is heard
In our land.

She stroked his hair as she whispered the last line with emphasis, and through tears, “My beloved is mine and I am his.”

Lorenzo wept openly as he caressed her in this, the only respite of trust and consciousness he would ever know. His stolen hours with her would always be bittersweet. Why God had created someone so perfect for him, and yet did not allow them to be together, was the issue that would challenge his faith and serve to torment him every day of his
life.

He held her face in his hands, gazing into her eyes as he entered her.

“It is always spring when I am with you,” he whispered as they moved together in the perfect rhythm of destined lovers. “You are my only beloved, Colombina. My only wife in the eyes of God.
Semper.
Always.”

And then the time for words was finished as lips, soft and searching, blended their shared breath in a way that matched their bodies and ultimately their souls, souls which had been joined together since before the dawn of time.

The parents of Simonetta Cattaneo would have indeed been pleased with the friends who awaited their cherished girl in Florence. Lucrezia Donati, known to her loved ones as Colombina, the Little Dove, took
the beautiful, shy young girl under her protective wings. She integrated the lovely Simonetta into their community and watched with no small degree of humor as the men of the Order fell to her feet in a heap each time she entered the room.

Colombina shared with Simonetta the ways of the Order as she had learned them, the beautiful teachings of love and community that had enhanced her own life beyond any imaginings. She sat and held her friend’s hand during the sacred lessons of union as they were taught by the Mistress of the Hieros-Gamos, Ginevra Gianfigliazza. Such lessons of the deeper physical interactions between a man and a woman were daunting, even terrifying, for one as delicate as Simonetta Cattaneo. She was a romantic creature and gentle of spirit; she was equally delicate of body. While tall, Simonetta was extremely thin and wan, even weak. She did not eat well or often and was sometimes overtaken with fits of coughing, which required her to retire to her bed. And while she had consummated her marriage to Marco Vespucci, Colombina and Ginevra knew that this was the sole time in which there had been any kind of physical union between the couple. Simonetta simply wasn’t well enough to take the chance of getting with child. Thankfully, her husband was gentle and patient, willing to try every possible doctor in Tuscany to heal Simonetta and work toward making her healthy first and foremost.

For another woman of a different character, the presence of such physical perfection as Simonetta would have been threatening, or at least irksome. But Colombina did not know or feel jealousy. In her studies with the Master, she had learned well the dangers of the Seven Patterns of Deadly Thought, and most corrosive of these was envy. Envy was an affront to God. To feel envy was to believe that you were not created perfectly as you were meant to be by your mother and father in heaven. To feel envy was to accuse God of caring for another more than yourself, which was not the nature of a loving parent. Parents were meant to love their children equally, and this was certainly true of our divine mother and father.

No, Colombina felt no envy of Simonetta’s beauty or of the attention she received from men. She knew full well what it was like to be
the object of intense male admiration, and it was not always an easy role to play. Beautiful women, no matter how virtuous, were often the subjects of scrutiny and gossip. Colombina had snapped at more than a few Florentine matrons whom she had overheard casting aspersions on her friend’s virtue. It infuriated her that the narrow-minded—and certainly jealous—women of Florence must immediately jump to the conclusion that Simonetta was Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress, simply because he paid court to her loveliness during a joust. The Medici men, indeed all men of the Order, honored the troubadour traditions of celebrating beauty. During Giuliano’s
giostra,
the festival of jousting that celebrated his coming of age, Simonetta was chosen to represent the Queen of Beauty, just as Colombina had once been chosen for Lorenzo. It was symbolic, a festive and mythical throne occupied by the woman judged by the young men of Florence to be the closest embodiment of Venus.

And from the day that Simonetta was introduced to Sandro Botticelli, the rumors in Florence became more vicious.

Sandro was besotted with her. He stopped sleeping at night, so tormented was he with her physical perfection. She became his only muse, the model for every nymph and goddess he painted. He drew her face endlessly through the night, trying to capture its contours and the magical way that her hair flowed around it in a frame of shimmery golden curls. He imagined her body beneath its heavy Florentine gowns, knowing that the lithe perfection of it was more beautiful than any he had seen before. He never meant to create such scandal, but the whispers began throughout Florence that Simonetta was posing nude for Sandro. Those who were enemies of the Order poisoned these rumors further, embellishing them to create legends of orgies where Simonetta shared her body with Sandro first, then the Medici brothers later.

Colombina was disgusted by it. The rumors challenged her belief that she could act only through love: there were times when it was very difficult to love those who reviled your family. And make no mistake, the members of the Order were her family, more than any blood relations had ever been. She loved Simonetta as a sister and wanted to
protect her from the acid nature of the jealous and intolerant. And yet one of the many lessons Colombina would learn in her life came to her through the beautiful girl from Genoa.

After hearing a particularly vile rumor about Simonetta in the marketplace, Colombina had taken the two spiteful Florentine girls who were its source to task publicly. She was infuriated that the sweet Simonetta was a constant source of gossip. Further, she was particularly sensitive as someone who had been victimized for years by those who whispered about her, referring to her by the title she carried behind the closed doors of Florence, “Lorenzo’s whore.”

Simonetta heard the story, which was turning into legend across the city, and came to visit her friend and defender.

“The little dove has claws, it is said,” she joked gently with her friend.

Colombina hugged her. “I could not help myself. Those girls were so poisonous in their jealousy, so hateful in the unfair things they said about you. I could not allow it to pass.”

Simonetta’s eyes were bright, but she did not shed tears. “It disturbs me less than you think, my sister, and certainly less than it does you. I know what those women say about me—and about you. But it matters not. As the Master has taught us, it is the struggle of all elements of beauty to be recognized and protected in this world. We mustn’t allow it to hurt us or turn us to anger. Wasn’t our own blessed Magdalena called a whore by so many?”

“She still is,” Colombina replied. That Maria Magdalena, the beloved of Jesus and the apostle of the apostles, was referred to as a repentant sinner and even as a prostitute was an injustice that rankled Colombina. It was in studying Madonna Magdalena that she had first come to understand the terrible struggle that the teachings of the Way of Love had encountered over the centuries. Maria Magdalena had become dangerous to the established church in Rome in the early days of Christianity. She represented a shadow side of Christianity, a set of teachings not beholden to the political strategies or economic goals of the Roman Church. The Way of Love was pure, taught as it was from
the Book of Love and its later editions of the Libro Rosso—and taught most often by women.

Colombina had a special role in the Order. She was the new scribe, committing the old prophecies of the Magdalene lineage to writing under the guidance of Fra Francesco. It was Colombina’s responsibility to ensure that the oral traditions of the Order did not die. Her current task was recording the story of the French prophetess called Jeanne, who had been executed at the stake for heresy a generation earlier. Colombina felt a special connection to the little maid from Lorraine, whom she dreamed about periodically. Sometimes Jeanne visited her in dreams and spoke to her of truth and courage, but Colombina only discussed these things with Fra Francesco and Lorenzo.

Along with Ginevra, Colombina was evolving into a very powerful and devoted force in the cause of absolute heresy in Florence.

Florence
1473

“C
LARICE DE
’ Medici is pregnant—again. Can you believe it?”

Costanza Donati, Colombina’s younger sister, couldn’t wait to deliver the news. Costanza was a pretty girl but a gossip, made all the more malicious by the jealousy she felt for her more beautiful sister.

“How I envy her,” Colombina sighed. “Does she appreciate it, I wonder? That she carries his name and wakes in his arms each day, as naturally as the sun rises. That she . . . bears his children.” Her throat caught at these last words, as they represented a terrible and private pain she had never expressed to anyone, and certainly not to Lorenzo.

“You don’t know that she wakes in his arms.” Costanza’s tone turned conspiratorial. “You know what they say, don’t you? His personal apothecary mixes a tincture that makes Lorenzo more potent so that when he is forced to bed his wretched wife, he impregnates her immediately. Then he can be free of her for the next ten months.”

“That is idle gossip, sister. Lorenzo is the most noble man I have ever known. He treats his wife as a queen. She is the mother of his children, and he reveres her for that.”

“Oh, of course Madonna Clarice wants for nothing,” Costanza said dramatically, before adding, “but she is colder than a slab of Carrara marble, that creature, and dull as dishwater. She is as far from you as it is possible to be, and Lorenzo worships at your altar. So to speak.”

Colombina indulged the inane giggling for a moment and then continued with her original thought. Costanza was hardly the perfect audience, but she was family and generally loyal, in spite of her petty nature. And Colombina needed to talk.

“But do you know what I am saying, ’Stanza? Clarice lives in his house and his crest is engraved in their marriage bed. What I wouldn’t give to know how that feels.”

Surprisingly, Costanza actually appeared to be listening. Her next comment was even insightful.

“Do you know what is tragic? I am certain that she envies you even more. Can you imagine what it is to have such a magnificent man for a husband and know that you will never satisfy him in any way? That his eyes are closed and he thinks of another each time he touches you? I bet he never kisses her.”

Colombina’s expression was wan. Costanza would never understand just how accurate she was, or why. Kissing was considered a great sacrament in the
hieros-gamos
tradition, known as the sharing of the sacred breath. It was an act that blended two spirits together by combining their life force energies, and was not to be shared by anyone except one’s most beloved. “No, I’m quite sure he does not kiss her.”

“Well, that would be torture for any woman married to a man like Lorenzo, even one as heartless as that Roman Medea.”

“She’s really not so bad, you know,” Lucrezia felt real sympathy for Clarice, who was, in her way, just as much a victim of circumstance as she and Lorenzo. “Clarice is quite kind beneath all that Roman coldness. And I don’t think she really cares that much how Lorenzo feels or whom he beds so long as he is discreet and provides for his family. And
he is expert at both those things. Lorenzo says Clarice is happiest when he leaves her alone, which suits him perfectly.”

“What do you think of her being pregnant again so immediately? You must admit, il Magnifico is shockingly fertile where his
wife
is concerned.” Costanza look pointedly at Colombina, who conspicuously had never become pregnant during her lengthy affair with Lorenzo. What Costanza did not know was that the same apothecary mixed an equally potent tincture for her, which she had used many times to bring about her courses and force bleeding. It was the same potion used by the high-market courtesans in Venice, who could not afford to allow pregnancy to interfere with their trade. Their clientele, ranking nobles and more than a few cardinals of the Church, paid handsomely for their ladies to remain beautiful and unmarred. Colombina tried not to fixate on this detail, on the idea that she was viewed by many in Florence as Lorenzo’s personal courtesan, albeit a highly pedigreed and exquisite one. No one dared speak it for fear of the Magnificent wrath that it would invoke, but she was not a fool. Colombina knew what was said of her by those who had no love of the Medici. And yet, she allowed it little time to disrupt her. She had taken an oath to belong to Lorenzo for eternity, and nothing mattered to her more than that. Jealous and malicious Florentines be damned.