The Red Lily Crown (19 page)

“You are a monster,” Isabella sobbed. “You are making this up—none of it really happened.”

“It happened. Just as I have described it. With the dog's leash cutting off her breath at last, she scratched the two men a little, and kicked her feet, and then it was over.”

There was silence. Chiara could hear Isabella panting. She looked down at Morgante. The dwarf was curled on the floor, shaking. If he was crying, he made no sound. The priest and the ladies had shrunk away from the door, and were huddled together in the middle of the room.

Someone had to do something.

Someone had to fight back.

Santa Monica, Chiara prayed silently, patron of mistreated wives, pray for us all. Then she took a breath.

“Don Paolo!” she cried. “We are listening, all of us. You must let Donna Isabella come out. If you harm her, we will hear it.”

Isabella's husband laughed. “Listen away,” he said. “You will hear only a man taking back his honor. Massimo, help me. I don't want this one biting my fingers to the bone.”

Massimo?

“Coward!” Isabella shrieked. “Coward, coward, to have a hired bravo under the bed—you cannot even attempt to murder your own wife? You have never been good for anything but consorting with whores and spending my family's money. No! Do not touch me!”

The blue night-gown flashed by Chiara's eyes again. There were screams, grunts of effort, slaps and blows, gasping struggles for breath—it was impossible to tell who was making what sound. Frantically Chiara tore at the crack between the door and the doorjamb. She knew it was useless—some part of her knew—but all she could think of was that she could hear them, through the crack, and she couldn't reach them. How could it be real that she was so close and she could hear them and she couldn't reach them?

She shouted—
leave her alone, leave her alone
—but her voice was lost in the cacophony.

Then all of a sudden there was silence.

Silence for a long time, long enough to say the Pater at least three times.

No one in the room moved.

Then the lock rasped, and the door was abruptly pushed open. The edge of the wood, swinging back, crushed the fingers of Chiara's left hand—she had never known such pain, pain that took her breath away so she couldn't even scream. She tried to pull her hand free but it was caught. The pain sharpened her senses. She heard Morgante scrabbling back on his hands and knees, a man's heavy panting, her own animal whine of agony.

“One of you women.” It was Don Paolo, then. He wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “Fetch some vinegar, quickly. Donna Isabella has fainted while washing her hair in a basin.”

The women scattered. Chiara knew they were not running to fetch vinegar—they were running for their lives. The priest was already gone.

Don Paolo went back into the bedchamber and closed the door. Oh, God, blessed cessation of pain. Chiara snatched back her hand and cradled her fingers against her breast—the skin was sliced open, she was bleeding, were the bones broken?

Did it matter?

Had Isabella truly fainted?

She ran into Isabella's own bedchamber. Let it be true, let it be true, let her only have fainted. One-handed she threw open a chest, dug through the pots and bottles, and found a glass-lined silver flask of vinegar. She ran back to Don Paolo's bedchamber, with Morgante behind her. He was the only one of Donna Isabella's household to remain faithful. They went in.

Isabella de' Medici was sprawled half on her knees beside the bed, the coverlets still clutched in her hands as if she had been trying to climb up into the immense feather mattress. There was an empty basin on a table beside the bed. Her hair had come free from its loose nighttime braids and spilled wildly down over her shoulders, haphazardly drenched with water—any fool could see that the water from the basin had been thrown over her after she had fallen. Her head was bowed, her face hidden. She might indeed have fainted from terror or fury.

Don Paolo was standing bent over, gasping to catch his breath. The other man, the one he had called Massimo, stood on the far side of the bed. He was dark—that was the only impression Chiara had, dark hair, dark clothes, dark evil. She stumbled to the bed—please please let her be only in a faint—and knelt beside Isabella. With her teeth she opened the flask of vinegar and with the heel of her wounded hand she gently tilted Isabella's head back.

She was dead. Her flesh was still warm, but it had the inert claylike consistency of dead things.

Her face was mottled with purple, and her eyes half-closed, with the whites glimmering between the lashes. Her mouth was open and her tongue thrust out. There was blood—she had bitten her tongue in her desperate fight for her life. Her beautiful sky-blue velvet night-gown, all glittering with jewels, had been pulled off her shoulders, and one of her breasts was terribly bruised and ruptured, as if it had been crushed. Around her neck, there was the reddened imprint of a cord.

The looped cord lay on the floor beside her. It was red silk, with tassels on the ends.

Chiara put the vinegar flask down. For a moment she thought—will he kill me too? She lay her hand lightly over Isabella's eyes, pressing down the lids.
You presume too much, Mona Chiara
. Then she stood up and faced the Duke of Bracciano. A widower, now, by his own hand.

“Why did you bother to call for vinegar?” she said. She was astonished at herself, that her voice was so calm. “You knew it would do her no good.”

He grinned at her. “For the others to hear. They will report that she fainted, nothing more, and then died of a sudden sickness. That she drank too much cold water when she was overheated. That she fell and struck her head on the basin, while she was washing her hair. Who cares? But you—” He looked at her more closely. He had scratches on his fat cheeks and down his own throat, and one of his eyes was half-closed with bruising. Isabella had fought for her life. “What is your name?”

Chiara looked back at him. It was probably stupid to say it but she didn't care. Clearly she said, “I am Chiara Nerini.”

“By the balls of Christ,” he said. “The grand duke's pet sorceress. Well, Chiara Nerini, the grand duke himself knew what I intended to do, and gave his consent. My wife betrayed me with my own kinsman, and it was my right to kill her, to avenge my own honor, and the honor of the house of Medici, which she also despoiled with her lewdness.”

It sounded as if he had written it out beforehand, and committed it to memory. Chiara said nothing.

“So say what you want. No one will believe you, and even if they do—it is a man's right to defend his honor.”

Morgante had crawled over to Isabella's body and was stroking the soft blue velvet of her night-gown. He said nothing, but whimpered like a child.

“Who would I tell?” Chiara said at last. She could hear the bitterness in her own voice. It was like Babbo's voice, after Gian was killed. It was like Nonna's voice, when she talked about the Medici. Bitter as tears and blood and death. “If it was the grand duke's will that she die, who will listen to me?”

“Get me some wine,” Don Paolo said. “Cavaliere Massimo—go get the coffin. Call some of the men from the stable, and they will put her in it.”

Chiara walked out of the room. She didn't look back. She was dizzy with shock and pain and horror, and the only thing she could think to do was get back to Florence and take the last book, her father's most precious book, out of its hiding-place in the wall of the bookshop's cellar. It was valuable. She would take it with her to Pistoia, so she did not have to arrive empty-handed.

She was finished with the Medici, with or without the
Lapis Philosophorum
. She was finished with courts. Finished with alchemy. She'd find her way to Pistoia and Nonna and the girls, even if she died trying. They'd stay there for a while, until the grand duke forgot about them, but not forever. No, not forever. They were the Nerini and they'd lived in Florence for two hundred years. They'd find a way to come home, and everything would go back to the way it was before she ever went out in the rain to sell a silver descensory to Francesco de' Medici.

Nothing will ever go back the way it was
, Babbo's voice whispered gleefully.
Remember the labyrinth on that silver descensory? You're trapped in the labyrinth of the Medici, and you'll never escape. Never in this life, or in any other.

Florence

19 JULY 1576

S
he went home with Donna Isabella's body and the rest of her household the day after the murder. She had no other choice—she couldn't walk all the way to Florence without food or water and she'd have been easy pickings for bandits if she'd tried to steal a horse and ride alone. Her broken fingers turned purple and green and black and throbbed with every beat of her heart. She tried to wash them—
wash a wound with wine and comfrey root to drive out the evil humors
, Nonna always said—but it hurt so much she couldn't manage it on her own. The broken skin puffed up and turned red and shiny.

As they traveled, she kept far away from Don Paolo in his enormous litter, from the dark Cavaliere Massimo, and most of all from the makeshift coffin. The July heat was unrelenting and Isabella's body had been tumbled into the box with no embalming, not even a shroud or the traditional bathing and dressing by her ladies. Father Elicona had been dragged from his hiding-place and compelled to give her a conditional unction, so at least there was that. Was her soul at peace? How could it be?

As they traveled, Chiara began to feel sick and feverish. Her whole arm ached. The voices whispered, whispered, whispered—Babbo and the demons and now women's voices, too, Isabella's and Dianora's.
We had lovers, pleasures; we shuddered and screamed, and now we are dead, dead, dead. We died for our delights.

It was the middle of the night when they entered the city at last, through the Porta di San Frediano. They went directly to the old church of Santa Maria del Carmine, next to the Carmelite convent. Don Paolo did not make the effort of descending from his litter, but directed brusquely that the coffin be taken into the church.

“And Massimo?” he added. He might have been giving instructions for a basket of offal to be thrown to the kitchen-yard pigs. “Open it. Leave it open. I want everyone in the city to see her, and know that I have regained my honor in full.”

The dark man and three others wrestled the coffin from its cart and carried it into the church, handling it roughly and carelessly. Two other men lighted their way with torches. Chiara looked away.

“You, sorceress.”

Chiara turned her head slowly. She was dizzy. The moon was waning and with the torches gone inside the church, she could not see Don Paolo's face. There was only the suggestion of a hulking figure in the darkness of the litter, like a demon in a pit of hell.

“Go in and look at it,” he said. “Look at it well. In fact, all of you, her household—you, priest—you, dwarf—all of you women. Go in. Look at it. Look at what happens when you offend against the honor of the Orsini.”

The women began to whisper. Some of them started to cry. Clinging together, they climbed down from the carts and went into the church, too frightened to disobey. Father Elicona followed them, his eyes cast down. Morgante the dwarf alone seemed to have regained his good spirits, or perhaps he had gone mad with shock and grief. He walked on his hands, waving his feet, grinning. Chiara followed last of all, barely able to walk. She wanted to defy Don Paolo, but what good would it do?

Donna Isabella is gone, she told herself. Her soul is in Purgatory, suffering for her sins but safe. What this monster does with her poor earthly flesh means nothing to her.

In the church, the men had flung the coffin down in a small chapel in the south transept. The walls were covered with frescos, figures of people appearing to twist and whisper in the torchlight. On the right wall there was a man crucified upside down. He was screaming. Above him, a little to the right, a woman in grave clothes sat bolt upright, her arms crossed over her breast. The sound of the coffin nails being drawn out sounded like devils shrieking.

“There,” one of the men said. The coffin lid was tipped up and cast aside with a crash. “By the ass bones of San Martino, she stinks.”

The women began to scream and sob. They pushed each other, trying to be the first to flee the chapel. The priest gabbled a prayer and went out. Chiara stood with Morgante the dwarf, the people on the walls closing in around them, and looked.

Saints and angels. She turned around and vomited helplessly.

“Principessa, principessa,” Morgante sang. “Lady true, all in blue, color of the sky, falling down to die.”

“Lift up her skirts, Emiliano,” one of the men said. “I've never seen a princess's private parts before.”

“Her legs are still white. Well, mostly white. What happened to her tit? It looks like it's been smashed.”

“Massimo says her husband sat on her to hold her down. Fat as he is, that would've been enough to kill her in itself.”

“Look at her face.”

“That's not a face, it's a big black rotten melon with two holes punched in it where the eyes would be.”

They all laughed. Chiara pushed past them and ran to the door of the church, gasping for the clean fresh air of the night. She couldn't move her left arm at all. Her head hurt and she was dizzy and she fell to her knees, and that was the last thing she remembered.

Giovanna

A Faithful Union

The Palazzo Vecchio

ASSUMPTION DAY, 15 AUGUST 1576

“H
er name is Vivi,” Chiara said. “From
vivacità
. Because she's so bright-eyed and lively.”

She had an eight-week-old puppy in her lap, a daughter of Donna Isabella's Rina crossed back to the grand duchess's fine dark-eyed hound Rostig. The baby had the long, silky russet-colored ears of its breed, a white muzzle, and patches of black and russet on its plump little body.

“A fine name,” the grand duchess said. “It fits her.”

Rina, at least, had come out of the holocaust of Donna Isabella's household unscathed; with Donna Jimena's help, the grand duchess had seen to her safety and that of her newly born puppies. Isabella's children had joined the grand duchess's household as well, five-year-old Nora and four-year-old Virginio Orsini. Their father was claiming they weren't his anyway. Their father was claiming all kinds of things, including any Medici property he could get his fat, grasping hands on.

Little Don Cosimino, Dianora's three-year-old son, was not there. He was dead. A fever, some said. Dysentery, said others. Don Pietro roistered through the whorehouses of Florence, uncaring.

Chiara knew all these things only because Donna Jimena had told them to her. She herself had spent three weeks raving with fever, unconscious of anything going on around her. When she had awakened, the world had changed. She and Donna Jimena, like the dogs, belonged to a new mistress.

“She kept you alive, I think.” Donna Jimena was sitting in a chair across the room, one hand resting on Rina's head. Rina was watching her puppy anxiously. Donna Jimena looked as if she had aged a thousand years. Her cheeks were no longer round as last season's apples, but sagged with empty sorrow. Her whole world had been balanced on her love for Isabella, child and woman. What would she do now?

“We despaired for you, Chiara,” she said, “when Father Elicona brought you here. Your arm was swollen and your fingers were black and you were raving with fever.”

“Indeed,” the grand duchess said. “You cried out over and over about people from the wall of the church coming down, and—well, better not to speak of it. The priests from San Stefano brought the Sacra Cintola to Florence and placed it in your hand, that the Holy Virgin herself might heal you.”

“With some help from the grand duke's physicians,” Donna Jimena said. “They applied the French method, treatment with turpentine and oil of roses, just as they do with soldiers on the battlefield.”

“
Das terpintin
, bah,” the grand duchess said. “It was the Holy Virgin.”

“And Vivi.” Donna Jimena continued to pat Rina's head. “It was like another miracle when I put her into your arms. You stroked her ears and began to get better.”

“I remember, Donna Jimena, your voice telling me I had to take care of her.” Chiara tried to smile but didn't quite manage it. It felt as if it was wrong to smile. It felt almost as if it was wrong to be alive. Maybe she wasn't really alive, and all this was a dream. “I'm so grateful to you, and to you, Serenissima, more than I can say.”

“You will remain in my household,” the grand duchess said. “My husband, he agrees. He—came to my apartments last night, and we spoke at some length, about many things.”

She colored up as she spoke. How little it took, Chiara thought bleakly, to touch the emotions under the stiff Austrian pride. How unexpected that there were emotions to touch, after eleven years of misery and loneliness, homesickness and humiliation.

“He spoke of you, Signorina Chiara. He was pleased the physicians had saved your life, and restored the use of your hand.”

Chiara looked down at her left hand, resting on the puppy's fat little body. The second and third fingers were crooked and discolored and the nails had fallen off, but she could move them. Their ability to feel, sense hot and cold and textures, was returning. Vivi's puppy fur, for example, was warm and soft.

Was she really feeling it?

She was fortunate the grand duke wanted her to be alive, she knew that. So many of the people connected to Donna Isabella had disappeared. A lady who had sometimes looked after the children. A merchant who had sold her silk—and possibly passed on secret messages. Her gardener at the Baroncelli villa—his crime was that he had suddenly begun to wear fine clothes, too fine for his station. A chirurgeon and a cesspit-cleaner—saints only knew what crime they had connived in. Chiara couldn't remember all the names and all the people. Some were in prison and some were dead.

She was alive. Because the grand duke loved alchemy. No other reason.

Without any real sense of caring or urgency she said, “Does he intend to continue the search for the
Lapis Philosophorum
?”

“You wish to know, of course, if you are still bound by your vow. The answer is yes.” The grand duchess nodded in a brief, decided manner. “The English alchemist is still in the Bargello, but I suspect in the end he will be released—he has skills and knowledge no other man has.”

So the three of them, the grand duke, Magister Ruanno, and herself, were still a mystical triad, connected by the work they had done and the stones they wore. She'd heard the servants talking in the days since she'd recovered her lucidity—Ruanno dell' Inghilterra had been imprisoned a day or two before the murders of Donna Isabella and Donna Dianora. Obviously the grand duke had taken no chances that his pet alchemist might attempt to save either of the ladies. Had Magister Ruanno received her messages? All of them? Some of them? Had the grand duke intercepted them, and did he know it was she who had sent them?

Pain and fever had brought back the voices and the headaches, worse than ever. It had also brought a strange dreamlike state, a sort of not-caring. She was safe enough, here in the grand duchess's own household. Magister Ruanno was safe enough, wherever he was. Nonna and Lucia and Mattea were safe in Pistoia. The grand duke had the city in an iron grip of terror, and escape now would be impossible anyway.

She stroked Vivi's ears. They were warm and silky, with a scent like milk and
frittelle
. Her paws particularly, with their pink puppy pads, had the sweet
frittella
smell.

“I am going to the Palazzo Medici today,” the grand duchess said. “The grand duke is selling Donna Isabella's jewels and possessions to pay her debts, and I wish to collect a few things for her children before everything is gone. It is important, is it not, to have
andenken
, keepsakes, of one's mother?”

Chiara thought of her own mother, dead so soon after Gian's death. She had had no jewels, no trinkets. Her mother's few clothes had been cut down for the little girls and worn out. There was nothing left to remind her. Even her mother's face—sometimes it wouldn't come to her.

Her father's equipment, she knew where that was, at least. It was all in the grand duke's laboratory.

All but the book.

A representative of the Arte had been taking care of the shop since Nonna and the girls had fled. Had he gone down into the cellar? Had he looked closely at everything? What had become of the one ancient book with Babbo's handwritten notes, which she had wrapped so carefully in waxed silk and locked in an iron box and plastered into the wall?

“My own mother died a few days after I was born,” the grand duchess was saying. She liked to talk in private. No one who saw her in public, stiff and silent, would ever guess it. “I never knew her, but I have her portrait. I have some of her jewels. I brought it all to Florence with me, and sometimes I look at her face and draw strength from it.”

“There are portraits at the Palazzo Medici,” Chiara said. “There's one in particular, of Donna Isabella with her children—it's very good.”

“You shall come with me. You have been up, walking in the garden, have you not? You are strong enough. It would be good for you to go out.”

“Serenissima. I beg you. I don't want to go back to the Palazzo Medici. Donna Jimena can find the portrait for you.”

“You must face the things that cause you pain.” The grand duchess rose. Chiara and Donna Jimena rose as well, Chiara cradling the puppy in her arms. The grand duchess looked at them for a moment, and then she said again, “You must face the things that cause you pain. I know that to be a true thing.”

Chiara bowed her head. If the grand duchess could endure eleven years of disappointment and homesickness and unhappiness, she could endure a visit to the Palazzo Medici. It didn't matter anyway. She said, “Yes, Serenissima.”