The Red Lily Crown (20 page)

T
here was a coach in the street outside the front door of the Palazzo Medici. The driver lounged on his box at the front, wearing the red, blue and gold colors of the Medici. The coach itself was painted red, with ornate gilded carvings of laurel leaves and feathers around the edge of the roof and outlining the doors. On the door panel itself there was a white circle with a painted device: a traveling hat with two strings.

“Do you wish to pass by, Serenissima?” Donna Jimena recognized the device, just as they all did—the
cappello
of the grand duke's Venetian mistress.

“No.” The grand duchess gestured that the door to her own coach be opened. “I am here. I will go in. Accompany me.”

She stepped out. Donna Jimena helped her with her skirts. Chiara followed them. How did the grand duchess manage to appear so erect, her back so straight, her head so high? She wore steel corsets and padded dresses to disguise her twisted back, but there was more to it than that. It was the pride of a daughter of emperors and queens, pride that created a special quality in the air around her, despite her plainness and melancholy and the Habsburg deformity of her chin.

The palazzo's great door was opened for her—Medici guardsmen jumped to do her bidding, despite the fact that they had arrived with her husband's mistress. She passed through without a word, into the inner courtyard. Pillars of white stone supported arches to create airy colonnades, and above the arches there were carved stone medallions, classical scenes interspersed with the Medici balls. The walls were decorated with niches, and within the niches stood magnificent statues of gods and goddesses. Orange and lemon trees in pots gave the air a faint piquant scent.

“Where is this portrait you described, Signorina Chiara?”

The grand duchess had settled on “Signorina” as a suitable form of address—superior to the guildswoman's “Mona” yet not as high in status as the noblewoman's “Donna.” Details like that were important to her. She didn't acknowledge the title of
soror mystica
at all. For her, a sister was a nun, vowed to the religious life; the use of the Latin word as part of a title for an alchemist's assistant was blasphemous to her.

“It's upstairs, Serenissima, in Donna Isabella's—in the salon that was Donna Isabella's private music room.”

They went upstairs. The palazzo was quiet, with no sounds but the faraway splashing of water in the garden fountain. Where was Bianca Cappello? With her coach outside the palazzo so openly, surely she was somewhere inside. There were so many chambers and salons and elegant rooms for writing and studying.

Everything Chiara saw brought back a memory: the fruit trees; the graceful, neatly laid out garden where Donna Isabella would walk at twilight; the silken tapestries; the gold and silver vases; and the books, everywhere the books, a fortune in beautiful books, old and new, that Donna Isabella had loved and pored over and discussed endlessly with her little court of ladies and gentlemen.

Lift up her skirts, Emiliano. I've never seen a princess's private parts before.

Her legs are still white. Well, mostly white . . .

Chiara swallowed back nausea. The terrible men's voices had somehow connected themselves to her demons' voices, and wouldn't go away.

“This way, Serenissima,” she managed to say. “The music salon, it's at the end of this corridor.”

They started down the hallway with its black-and-white tessellation of fine marble. At the same time Bianca Cappello stepped out of a chamber on the left side, just opposite the music room. She froze, midstep; her waiting-woman, walking behind with bundles of clothing and linens, almost stumbled over her. The grand duchess stopped as well. The two women looked at each other in awful silence.

The grand duke's mistress had a belly. Round and high, only four or five months' worth, but definitely a belly.

The grand duchess didn't move. She gazed at her husband's pregnant mistress.

Bianca Cappello broke first. She sank into a curtsy, spreading out her amber-colored velvet skirts. Her oversleeves were slashed to show off silver satin undersleeves, embroidered with gold in a barred pattern. She wore rich rings and pearls around her neck and jewels in her braided hair. She looked like an actress in one of the new commedia dell'arte companies, dressed up as a lady, compared to the severe and inborn dignity of the grand duchess.

“Serenissima,” she said. Her voice trembled a little.

The grand duchess made her wait. Then she said coldly, “You may rise, Signora Bianca. What are you doing here, in my sister-in-law's palazzo? Stealing her clothes, I see. Her very underclothes.”

Bianca Cappello straightened. She was quite beautiful, if you liked a lot of lush, velvety flesh. She had strongly marked brows and red-gold hair that obviously owed a good part of its color to henna, chamomile, and a powdering of gold dust. Her eyes flashed. She had her pride as well, it was plain to see, and these days she wasn't used to being addressed as plain Signora.

“I have the grand duke's personal authority, and his own guardsmen to escort me,” she said. “And his permission to take what I please. What are you yourself doing here, Serenissima? Surely Donna Isabella's possessions are so suggestive of worldly pleasure that they could only disgust you.”

Yes, she had her pride. What would the grand duchess say to that? Chiara held her breath.

“On the contrary. Even in worldly possessions, I recognize elegance and refinement.” The grand duchess swept her eyes up and down Bianca's figure, the yards and yards of amber velvet, the embroidered sleeves, the opulent bosom, the thickened waist. She looked at the waiting-woman with her bundles, like a rag collector. The waiting-woman, at least, had the grace to blush.

The grand duchess said, “I recognize its lack, as well.”

“Elegance and refinement are overrated,” Bianca said. Her eyes glittered—tears?—but her mouth was drawn back over her fine white teeth. She arched her back, deliberately thrusting her belly forward. “Men, particularly, often find too much refinement—tedious.”

Chiara saw the grand duchess flinch. It was such a small movement, so quickly and rigorously controlled, that only someone standing as close as she was, close enough to touch the grand duchess's slight figure, would have noticed it.

“How fortunate for you, then,” she said. Her voice was like the flavored snows sometimes served at court banquets, ice-cold and sweet. “No man would ever fault you for over-refinement. You have my permission to leave my presence, Signora Bianca, and take yourself out of this place.”

Bianca Cappello's heavy brows slanted together over her nose, and she took a step forward. “I will tell him what you have said to me,” she said. “He will be angry that you have been discourteous.”

The grand duchess did not move. There were centuries of breeding in her immobility. She said nothing.

Bianca walked toward them, her waiting-woman following her. The grand duchess looked through her, as if she were not there. Bianca stopped, two steps away, her color high.

“Donna Jimena,” she said. That startled them all. “Will you be discourteous, too? You are lower than I—you should curtsy to me as I walk past you.”

“I would sooner curtsy to one of the potted trees in the courtyard.” Every one of Donna Jimena's sad deflated wrinkles quivered with outrage. “I am vastly your elder in years and an Osorio by blood, the first lady-in-waiting to the Princess Isabella from the days of her childhood. It is you who are the lower, Signora. Being a great man's mistress and the mother of his bastard does not give you that great man's rank.”

Bianca sucked in her breath. The grand duchess continued to stare straight ahead.

“You, then.” Bianca looked straight at Chiara. “I know who you are—you are Francesco's alchemist girl. You at least should curtsy in my presence—you are nobody, a bookseller's daughter he picked up in the street.”

Chiara felt as if she were underwater—there was that sense of something clear and heavy drifting between her and Bianca Cappello. It was a shocking impropriety for her to refer to the grand duke by his Christian name, in public, before his wife. But then, everyone knew how the grand duke cosseted her. How they play-acted together like children. How she was the only person in all of Florence who could coax him to smile.

What was she, Chiara Nerini, daughter of guildswomen and supporters of the Florentine republic, doing standing in the Palazzo Medici, caught between the grand duke's furious big-bellied mistress and his steel-proud Imperial wife? A month ago, two months ago, three months ago—how long had it been?—she would have been excited, proud even, to be at the center of such a moment. What did she feel now? Nothing. I should probably take a few moments, she thought, work out all the possible consequences of what I do. But the consequences didn't matter.

She met Bianca Cappello's eyes and thrust out her chin in the way Nonna hated. She bent her knees the tiniest fraction, so tiny as to be more insulting than no curtsy at all. She smiled, curling her left hand with its misshapen fingers into a fist. Then she made her eyes look through the grand duke's mistress as if she was not there, just as the grand duchess had done.

“You will be sorry for that,” Bianca hissed.

She stormed away. The waiting-woman dropped one white silk camicia, embroidered with black work and faceted jet beads. Her face red as fire, she came back and gathered it up, then followed her mistress. After a moment the front door slammed.

“Signorina Chiara,” the grand duchess said. Her voice was composed. Her back was straight, or might as well have been. “Let us continue. I particularly desire to collect the portrait of Donna Isabella with her children, and any other
andenken
that will help to make their grief less, as they grow up without her.”

The Palazzo Bargello

20 AUGUST 1576

R
uan had not been held in the dungeons under the Volognana Tower. He had not been stripped, manacled, tortured or starved. The grand duke's guards had taken him the night of July seventh, four of them coming at him from behind as he locked the door of the laboratory at the Casino di San Marco. From that day to this he had been shut up in one of the small rooms at the back of the second story of the Bargello, given food, wine, water to wash with, books and paper, pens and ink, if he wished to read or write in the hours of daylight. Nothing more. No one would speak to him. The grand duke did not visit him, although clearly it was the grand duke who had arranged his imprisonment.

There was one small window, which looked out to the east, away from the Palazzo Vecchio, away from the Casino di San Marco. Away from everything in Florence that tied him to the Medici. He knew why he had been arrested in such a secret fashion—the grand duke had decided to move against Isabella and Dianora, and wanted no interference from his English alchemist, his sister's one-time lover.

Isabella was dead. He knew it. He could feel it. As with the sublimation of iodine, the direct change from an ordinary solid to a glorious violet mist, his sense of her had been transformed from earthbound flesh to numinous spirit. And all the while he had been locked in this room, safe, well-treated, and entirely helpless. It was worse than any torture, and Francesco de' Medici knew it.

Francesco de' Medici.

I will kill him, Ruan thought. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or even this month, this year. I will bide my time, gain my freedom, use his laboratories and resources to create a
Lapis Philosophorum
that will astonish him, blind him, and extract from him the riches I need. But I will kill him in the end, for what he has done to Isabella.

Ruan waited. Using the paper and pens, he wrote equations and formulas. He had never seen beauty in written words, letters or plays or poetry. He saw beauty in numbers and chemical symbols.

He waited. They had not taken his amulet, the chunk of hematite on its iron and copper chain. He himself had taken it from around his neck for the first time in years, and put it on the table. It was a reminder—this is what you were, a creature of the Medici. This is what you are no longer.

It also made him think of the girl, Chiara Nerini. He wondered if she was still wearing her amulet, the moonstone. Had the grand duke intercepted the messages from her? If he had, she was imprisoned too, or dead. The thought disturbed him, more than he would have expected. He imagined her carrying the silver sieve filled with water. Walking the arcs and double folds of the labyrinth on the floor of the laboratory, her dark hair loose to her hips, the moonstone glimmering on her breast. She was ordinary-looking, sharp-chinned, plain, even, but for that magnificent hair and those changeable, changeable eyes. He had coerced her into sending him the messages. If she was dead, he was responsible.

He did not want her to be dead. He was surprised, a little, by the intensity of his need for her to be alive. By the fact that he could not bear the thought of not seeing her again.

Forty-four days after he had been imprisoned, just as the light through his window was fading, the lock scraped, the door opened, and the grand duke walked into the room.

“Ruanno,” he said.

Ruan did not allow himself to show surprise. He said nothing.

The door remained open. There were guardsmen outside. Francesco de' Medici was taking no chances with his prisoner.

“What is done, is done,” the grand duke said. He was richly dressed in dark blue velvet. He held a pomander in one hand, an orange studded with cloves and cured in ground cinnamon bark and orrisroot powder. Ruan wondered if he had expected to find an unwashed, gibbering maniac, broken by forty-four days of solitude.

“Isabella is dead,” the grand duke went on. “She deserved to die—she dishonored her husband and the house of Medici by taking lovers, and involved herself in Donna Dianora's treason. Even you cannot argue that.”

“I do not argue the lovers,” Ruan said. “It is no particular secret that I myself was one of them. I do argue her death at your hand.”

He did not bother to address the grand duke with titles or honor. In his own ears, his voice sounded rusty from disuse.

“My hand?” the grand duke said. He tossed the pomander from one hand to the other and back again. “No. The Duchess of Bracciano died by misadventure, while washing her hair.”

“
Re'th kyjyewgh hwi
.”

“Whatever that means in your barbarous language, it changes nothing. However she died, Ruanno, she is dead.”

“And Donna Dianora?”

“That is a different matter. Don Pietro our brother took her life, as was his right, for her treasons and her unfaithfulness.”

Ruan said nothing.

“As long as you stay here,” the grand duke said, “you are nothing but a nameless prisoner—not a metallurgist, not an alchemist. And another thing—you cannot continue the plots you have afoot.”

“I have no plots.”

“No? I know you have been buying influence at the English court, with the intent to ruin the Englishman who now owns the manor and mine where you grew up. I could arrange—”

Ruan stopped listening. He closed his eyes and saw Mount's Bay, the mystical island of Saint Michael's Mount itself rising in its center. The granite and serpentine cliffs and the drowned forests under the sea, trees turned into stone, of unimaginable antiquity. He saw the vast marshes, smelling of salt and life, the herons, the twining of mallows and moonflowers. Moors and stone-hedged fields where tough, shaggy ponies grazed, and just beyond, Milhyntall House itself, sturdy and square with its center courtyard. Apple trees, the gillyflower apples tasting of cloves. A few miles farther, the winzes and shafts of Wheal Loer.

Home. Land saturated with the blood of his father and mother, his grandparents, his family for longer than anyone could remember. He would take it back from Andrew Lovell, whatever it cost him, and he would never give it up again.

Suddenly he realized what the grand duke was saying. He opened his eyes.

“I could arrange to purchase influence of my own. Support for the Englishman. His name is Andrew Lovell, is it not? All the lands around Marazion”—he pronounced the name of the market town in English, awkwardly—“were confiscated after the Cornish rebellion in 1549. The English queen is sensitive, I think, on the subject of rebellion, and might be persuaded the estate should remain in loyal English hands.”

Ruan said nothing.

“I know everything about you,” the grand duke said. “Ruan Pencarrow of Milhyntall. You should be called Ruanno della Cornovaglia, should you not? I have chosen to allow you to keep your secrets, because you are a metallurgist like no other, and an alchemist with knowledge that is valuable to me. I also know how you came by that knowledge.”

“Do you now.” In his heart, in Cornish, Ruan was repeating,
I will kill you. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or even this month, this year. I will bide my time, gain my freedom, use your laboratories and resources. But I will kill you in the end, for what you have done to Isabella
.

“I do.” If the grand duke divined his thoughts, he gave no sign. “Your family were loyalists, captured after the siege of Saint Michael's Mount. They were imprisoned for months at Launceston by mad rebels who wanted to say their prayers in their own barbarous language. When they came out, the rebellion had been crushed and all the lands in Cornwall had been parceled out to Englishmen—even the lands of loyalists were given away. Andrew Lovell was a fine and trusted lieutenant of Sir Gawen Carew, and so obtained your father's estates.”

I will kill you in the end.

“Andrew Lovell wanted no displaced Cornishmen to dispute his ownership, and so he had your father murdered. Your mother hid herself among the miners and dared not reveal her true name or yours. She died when you were five or six, and you went into the mines, working from dawn to nightfall for crusts of bread and a place to sleep.”

I will kill you.

“You would be there still, but under your dirt and calluses you were a handsome boy, were you not? The German metallurgist certainly thought so. Konrad Pawer, his name was, no? He called himself Conradus Agricola, trading upon his uncle's famous name. Andrew Lovell wanted to improve his mine's production, and thought Agricola's nephew could help. What Pawer helped was the warmth of his own bed, by taking you into it.”

“When one is not born a prince,” Ruan said, “one has to seize the opportunities that present themselves.”

The grand duke laughed. It was unpleasant. “You became his catamite. He took you back to Vienna, allowed you to educate yourself, and in time the student surpassed the master.”

“I was not unwilling. As you say, without him I would still be carrying rocks in the mines of Cornwall.”

“And without hope of taking revenge on the Englishman who usurped your estates and killed your father.”

“That also.” Ruan shifted his position and stood up.

“In Vienna, in fact, you became notorious, both for your own talents and your master's excesses. Your name came to the attention of the emperor himself.”

“He wished to exploit the gold mines of the valley of Rauris,” Ruan said. “Konrad Pawer was a charlatan—he had none of his uncle's knowledge.”

“How convenient, then, that he died as he did. Leaving all his uncle's papers to you.”

Ruan met the grand duke's eyes steadily. He had never told anyone what had happened the night Konrad Pawer died.

“You were certainly willing enough to leave Austria, when the emperor invited you to join the Archduchess Johanna's household. He knew of my interest in alchemy, and meant to amuse me by sending you to me.”

“I was hardly invited.”

“Invited, ordered, to emperors it makes no difference. You left Austria willingly enough. Who knows what crimes you left behind you?”

“You were pleased enough to have me, crimes or not.”

The grand duke stepped closer. Ruan could smell the sharp, spice-sweet scent of the pomander. “I was pleased,” he said. “And you did not disappoint me. Ruanno, give up this mad determination to hate me over my sister's death. I will give you any woman you want. Take your place at court, as you were before. Return to the laboratory. Put your amulet around your neck again.”

Ruan said nothing.

The grand duke stepped closer still. He said, in a very quiet and intense voice, “I cannot create the
Lapis Philosophorum
without you, Ruanno, and you cannot create it without me and the resources I provide.”

“That,” Ruan said, “is true enough.”

“You cannot pull the strings of your plots while you are here, like this.”

“True also.”

“Will you give it all up, then, for the death of one woman?”

For a moment Ruan thought he saw her, not the restless, sensual voluptuary she had become but the young Isabella he had loved so passionately, straight and shining, beautiful as an angel with her magnificent red-gold hair and her eyes brilliant as stars in the night. He saw her laughing, running—running away from him. Not looking back. His heart broke to see her go, and at the same time ached with anguish that he had not protected her as he should have done.

“The amulet,” the grand duke said. “Put it on again, Ruanno.”

What to do?

He might be able to kill the grand duke with his bare hands before the guardsmen standing outside the door cut him down. A quick revenge for Isabella, yes, but then Andrew Lovell the Englishman would live and die at Milhyntall House and take the riches of Wheal Loer, forever. He would pass them on to his sons and the Pencarrows would be forgotten.

If he waited, though. If he waited.

Demosthenes had said it:
The man who retreats shall fight again
.

If he waited, pretended to surrender, he could gather his strength and choose his own time. He could continue the quest for the
Lapis Philosophorum
, continue to amass gold of his own, continue his intrigues to take back his home. And in the end, in the end—yes, he would see Francesco de' Medici dead at his feet.

Slowly he picked up the amulet and put it around his neck.

“Vow upon the amulet that you will give up your hatred. That you will bend all your mind and skills toward our alchemical experiments. Do that, and you will have endless gold. Do that, and I will help you obtain what you desire in Cornwall.”

Ruan took the chunk of hematite in his hand. In the past it had always felt warm to him, a piece of the living earth, bound with chains of purified ore from the earth's heart. Now it felt cold. The life, the connection, were gone. He could swear upon it, and the vow would have no meaning.

“I will give up my hatred,” he said, his tongue smooth as silver. “I will say nothing more of your sister. I will return to the court and to the laboratory, and take up our experiments again. I vow it, upon this amulet.”

The grand duke gestured to the guardsmen outside the door, and they went away. That was as much a vow as any words. Ruan could have killed him with his bare hands—even after forty-four days confined, he had the strength and weight. But he needed the grand duke's gold.

“Our
soror mystica
,” he said, “the girl Chiara Nerini—she is well? She will work again with us?”

The grand duke placed his own hand over his chest. Under the velvet doublet and the fine silk shirt, Ruan knew the double rose-cut diamond lay, the sun to his hematite's earth. To complete the triad, the moonstone was necessary.

“She is well enough,” the grand duke said. “She was at Cerreto Guidi when—when my sister suffered her unfortunate accident. In attempting to be of service, she herself was injured, the fingers of her left hand crushed.”