The Red Lily Crown (35 page)

The Palazzo Pitti

29 MARCH 1582

“P
rince Filippo's soul has fled to heaven,” the priest said. “You must let him go, Serenissimo—clinging to his abandoned flesh is unseemly, as if you would deny the will of God.”

Francesco de' Medici ran his hand lightly over his four-year-old son's forehead. It was still warm and moist with the sweat of his final throes. His curly hair—his mother's hair—lay in damp ringlets. His cheeks were flushed—true Medici blood under his delicate child's skin, mingled with Imperial blood by means of a legitimate union. So much joy, so much hope, centered on this single fragile boy child. What was under the high forehead, the bulging skull, that had brought all the joy and hope to nothing?

“A moment longer,” Francesco said.

The priest bowed and withdrew. The physicians had long since fled. Seventeen days—seventeen
days
—the little prince had suffered with fever and convulsions. None of the physicians' medicines or remedies had helped. Even Magister Ruanno's compound had lost its efficacy. In the end Francesco had known it was hopeless, and that the physicians were probably doing more harm than good.

His son. His one true-born heir. And he was yoked to the barren Bianca now, so there would be no more. There was only Antonio, so rudely healthy that sometimes he had wanted to slice him in half like a Sicilian orange, squeeze out the juice of his health and give it to Filippino to drink.

If I had only known, he thought, how much I would love him, and how much it would mean to me that he was a true son of my blood.

“My lord.”

Bianca's soft voice. Bianca's presence, warm and thick-fleshed and rustling with silk, her perfume overwhelming. He wanted the smells of the sickroom for a little longer, the purgings, the voidings, the last smells of his son.

She knelt beside him. “My lord, my heart aches for you, but we must let the serving-women into the room, to wash him and prepare him.”

“The grand duchess washed the bodies of her own dead children. Can I do less?”

He waited for her to protest.
I am the grand duchess now
.

He had given her a sumptuous public wedding, once his year of mourning had passed, a spectacular coronation. She had made her procession through the streets of Florence in a chariot drawn by lions and heaped with red lilies—the lions being less than cooperative, but managed reasonably well by his menagerie-keepers. On either side had been drawn floats lined with silver, decorated with more lilies and filled with water, upon which white swans swam with graceful bad temper; because of her name, Bianca, she had chosen the white swan for her device.

He himself had anointed her with the holy oil and placed the coronet upon her head. The Venetians had suddenly discovered it in their hearts to forget her elopement, her theft of her father's jewels, her years of shame as his mistress—in fact they had hastened to create her as a true and particular daughter of the republic. Her brother and his minions had flocked to Florence for favors, and the courtiers had truckled to her.

Florence itself, the guilds, the people in the streets, and most particularly the women, hated her. Sometimes Francesco thought that he had come to hate her, too. He hated the Grand Duchess Bianca, at least. He loved his Bia still, but since Bianca's coronation he had seen less and less of her. He did not understand how the marriage—a few words by a priest, a few days of celebrations—could have changed things so completely. For twelve years she had been his mistress and he had been obsessed with making her his wife. The moment she had become his wife, everything had changed.

He hated the Grand Duchess Bianca, the white swan. That was the truth of the matter.

“Let me bring in the serving-women to help you,” she said. Her voice was soft and gentle—Bia's voice. “They are waiting, with everything you will need.”

“Is Soror Chiara with them?”

“No.” Her grand duchess voice now. Silks rustled as she stood up and stepped away from him. “Why do you want her?”

“She has been in his household all his life, and she loved him. She loved his mother. She has been faithful, all this time—Giovanna cannot be here, but if there is anyone who can prepare him with a measure of his mother's love, it is Soror Chiara.”

“I loved him, too,” Bianca protested. “I will help you. Does he not deserve a grand duchess to wash him and wrap him in his shroud, and not a bookseller's daughter?”

The grand duke laid his son's body back on the bed, stood up, and swung his arm around in a single movement, from the gentlest of gentleness to the most violent brutality. His blow caught her across her mouth and made her stagger to one side. Once, such a blow would have knocked her down, but she had put on a great deal of flesh. His own increased flesh made him slower, and it was not as easy to strike her to the ground as it had been.

Once, such a blow would have excited him. The reddened skin around her mouth would have given him pleasure. This morning, he felt nothing.

She rubbed her hand across her mouth, her heavy brows slanting low over her eyes. She seemed to feel nothing either, other than the sting of the blow itself. “Very well, my lord,” she said in a flat voice. “I will fetch your sorceress. Be it upon your own soul, to have her touch Prince Filippo's body.”

She went out, trailing her overripe clouds of perfume. Francesco knelt by the bed again. A little while later, Soror Chiara came in.

“Serenissimo,” she said. He heard fabric rustle, and he knew she was curtsying. Outside of the laboratory, she curtsied like any other court lady. At one time, she had done it awkwardly, like the guildswoman she was. Now she curtsied as if she was born to it.

Softly she said, “May I be of service to you, Serenissimo, and to the prince?”

He looked up at her. Her expression changed for the space of a breath—widened eyes, parted lips, surprise and uncertainty to see him alone, unwashed and disheveled. That was one thing she had never learned in the—how many years had it been? Since just before his father's death, so eight years—she had been connected to the court. She could not always keep her face from showing her feelings.

Everything else about her was different. Her character, which at first had been barely suggested in her features, had been finished and polished and refined by adulthood and sorrow. She said very little, but her eyes spoke for her, clear and changeable. She wore the moonstone between her breasts every day—he could see the thin silver chain against the smooth skin of her neck. She took the
sonnodolce
. She had secrets and unlike any other woman he had ever known, she never spoke of them.
Qui vult secreta scire, secreta secrete sciat custodire,
she had shouted out to him on the day she had come to him with her silver descensory.
Whosoever would know secrets, let him know how to keep secret things secretly.
Sometimes he wondered if his
soror mystica
, chosen and initiated on a whim, had not become a greater alchemist than he himself would ever be.

“I would have you help me bathe him. I have instructed the physicians to open his body, particularly his head. I wish to know—”

His voice failed him. She said nothing, but only looked at him with such sadness in her eyes.

“I wish to know what it is that has made him this way, and also to be certain that his death was—not unnatural.”

“I will help you, Serenissimo.” She stepped to the door and gestured to the serving-women waiting outside. Again he was struck by the authority she had taken to herself. The women brought in ewers of hot water, a basin, washing-cloths and towels and fresh sheets, and a clean folded nightshirt. Although not really a nightshirt. A shroud. Murmuring among themselves, they went out.

“If you will lift the prince, please, Serenissimo, I will arrange the bed.”

He gathered his dead son up into his arms. She began to remove the soiled sheets from the bed and lay out fresh ones. She did not flinch from the terrible sights and smells of death, of seventeen days of sickness, and God be thanked, she wore no perfume of her own. She poured water into the basin, with as much exquisite care as if she were in the laboratory. It was faintly scented, some herb, astringent and not sweet.

“Let us wash the prince now, Magister Francesco,” she said.

It gave him a way to escape—to stop being Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose only true son was dead. Magister Francesco the alchemist, adept in the arts of the laboratory, was above such things as sons by the way of the flesh.

“I have no heir,” he said. He untied the shirt the little prince was wearing and slipped it over his head. His body was so thin, his little limbs so frail. I could put my thumb and first finger around his arm, he thought. Or perhaps he said it aloud.

“There is Cardinal Prince Ferdinando,” she said. She dipped a cloth into the basin, twisted it to wring out most of the water, and handed it to him. Then she dipped another cloth for herself. As gently as if the little prince were still alive, she began to wash his body. “And Prince Pietro as well.”

“I will never allow the crown to go to either one of my brothers.” Francesco washed his son's dead face. He was careful to leave the marks of the Holy Viaticum on his eyelids and lips and ears. “I will legitimate Don Antonio, before God and man. He will become the prince.”

She took another towel, a dry one. “The people will not accept him,” she said. There was an edge to her words, like a dagger sliding between his ribs to satisfy a
vendetta
. But of course that was only his imagination. His own sins were making him hear things that were not there.

“The crown is mine,” he said. “It will go to Prince Antonio. I will compel the people to accept him.”

“And your brothers?”

She handed him the clean nightshirt. He slipped it over Filippino's head and drew it down to cover his body, his arms and legs, all the way to his feet. His toes were so perfect and even. Why could he not have had crooked toes and a perfect head?

“Ferdinando is a prince of the church. He has no authority in secular matters—he will remain in Rome and continue his intrigues there. Perhaps he will be pope one day.”

She said nothing to that. Did she believe it? He did not really believe it but he repeated it to himself over and over, trying to convince himself. Ferdinando will remain a cardinal. Ferdinando will accept Antonio's right of succession. Ferdinando is my younger brother and he will do as I wish.

“Prince Pietro?” she said at last.

Pietro, who had murdered his beautiful young cousin-wife Dianora. Pietro, spendthrift and rake, who had left Florence and never come back, as if there were ghosts in the very streets that cried for revenge.

“Pietro is not suitable.”

She did not persist, but handed him a single napkin, snowy-white. He unfolded it and very gently laid it over his son's face.

“
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
,”
he recited. He remembered saying the psalm over his father's body, for no reason other than to appear pious to the outside world. This time, every word felt as if it was tearing out a piece of his heart.

“
Domine, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuae intendentes
.”
Soror Chiara's voice joined his.
“
In vocem deprecationis meae. Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, Domine, quis sustinebit?
”

From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If you, Lord, were to mark iniquities, who, O Lord, shall stand?

Her voice was clear and intense.

If you were to mark iniquities, who shall stand?

The bookshop of Giacinto Garzi, formerly the bookshop of Carlo Nerini

THE NEXT DAY

T
he last stage—
rubedo
, the reddening—of the
Lapis Philosophorum
was sealed inside the athanor. The fire was as low as Chiara could keep it. On the table beside the athanor she had pinned a piece of parchment with a record of the fuel added to the fire and the times and directions in which the athanor had been turned. Under that there was a chart of the days and the phases of the moon. Days were neatly checked off—twenty-four of them. In three more days, if all went well, the
Lapis Philosophorum
would be hers at last.

Footsteps. Chiara looked up, expecting Ruan. Instead it was Giacinto Garzi, Lucia's young husband from Pistoia, too tall for the narrow walled steps and too thin to fill out his quilted
farsetto
, the gown and hose of a prosperous bookseller. Lucia's dowry—paid for with the grand duke's gold, although no one else but Nonna knew that—and Cinto's election to a place in the guild on the day after their wedding, had rather gone to his head. The secret room in the cellar, kept under lock and key by his wife's unmarried older sister, was an affront to his position.

Or so Lucia was egging him on to believe. Chiara was sure as sure that Lucia was behind it all.

“Cinto,” she said. “How did you get a key to the cellar?”

“I took it from your Nonna's ring, while she slept. The shop is mine now, and all the keys should be mine as well.”

Lucia's words, coming from his lips.

“No,” Chiara said. “The cellar is mine alone. Give me the key.”

“I won't. The shop belongs to me now—”

“—and you agreed, upon marrying Signorina Chiara's sister and pocketing her dowry, that the cellar would not be considered part of the shop.” It was Ruan, coming down behind him. “Give Signorina Chiara the key, if you please.”

The boy's lower lip thrust out, but he had always been afraid of Ruan, older and stronger, the grand duke's own English alchemist with his whip looped over his shoulder and his hands scarred by the good God only knew what magic and sin. He threw the key to the floor at Chiara's feet.

“Get out of my way, then,
straniero
,” he said. “Have your secret room and your sorceries.”

Ruan stood aside with a mocking gesture, and the boy went back up the steps. His guildsman's gown trailed behind him like a Carnival costume made for a larger man. With his own key Ruan locked the door again, behind him.

“Maybe we should close off that door permanently and open the secret passage again,” Chiara said. She bent down and picked up the key from the floor. “The last thing we need is Cinto meddling down here. Ruan, listen—the little prince is dead.”

He came down the rest of the stairs, uncoiled the whip and laid it aside, and put his arms around her. She lifted up her mouth for his kiss, careless and comfortable as a wife. Well, for all practical purposes she was his wife. “The rumors are already out in the streets,” he said. “I am sorry, my heart. Were you there?”

“No, not when he died, but just afterward. The grand duke called for me to help lay out his poor little body.”

“He knows you love all the children.”

“The girls are heartbroken. I fear for Anna—she is not strong to begin with. She had a special bond with Filippino, I think, because they were both in fragile health.”

“Poor little boy. May he rest at last in his mother's arms.” Ruan crossed himself. Chiara did the same. Then she went over to the table and looked at the athanor again. The heat was at a perfect level. The athanor was solid stone and couldn't possibly be pulsing gently, but even so it looked as if it was.

“Three more days,” she said. “It has been hard to keep watch over it properly, with Filippino's lying-in-state and entombment, and the girls needing me.”

Ruan stepped over to the table and looked at the parchment with her calculations. “And if this attempt fails,” he said, “will you want to wait longer, and try again?”

There was an edge to his voice. It seemed as if there had been an edge to his voice for a long time.

“I couldn't leave the little prince,” she said. “He was so sick.”

“And before that, it was Nonna's blindness. Before that, Lucia's wedding. Before that, your first attempt at the
Lapis Philosophorum
. You have made excuse after excuse for over three years, and I have come to the end of my patience.”

She looked at him. He looked worn and tired. With a shock she realized there were a few silver threads in the coppery-dark thickness of his hair. He was only just back from another of his trips to the mine at Bottino—he had traveled there a dozen times in the past three and a half years, each time spending weeks attending to the tasks the grand duke had set him. Each time she had been afraid he would never come back, but each time he did.

They had attempted the
magnum opus
twice, in the first year after Ruan's return, and both times it had failed. Not surprising, considering the fact that she'd adulterated the grand duke's alchemical elements with her own hands. To her surprise, though, the grand duke had withdrawn into a fit of dark petulance and turned his attention to other things—to the automata in the gardens at the Villa di Pratolino, to the workshops of the court artists and artisans at the Uffizi, to his collection of curiosities in the hidden cabinets of his golden studiolo. It was as if he'd achieved what he wanted in Ruan's return and submission—apparent submission—and didn't care anymore.

Well, he'd achieved what he wanted in his marriage to Donna Bianca, and he didn't seem to care about her anymore, either.

In between the trips to Bottino, she and Ruan had snatched moments—too short, too few—of happiness. Every day it had seemed as if something would happen, and yet somehow every day had slipped away. How had three and a half years passed?

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say.”

“You must choose.”

“Now?”

“Now. At the end of your three days, and no later. Jago Warne has Wheal Loer running again, and Milhyntall House is in good enough repair for us to live there. I have gold enough, which I have transferred to my London bankers today. Chiara, it is time to go.”

“I need the
sonnodolce
,” she said.

“I will force the grand duke to give up the formula before I kill him.”

“If you will just give me time to create the
Lapis Philosophorum
, I won't need any more
sonnodolce
to keep back the voices and the headaches. It will heal me, completely and forever.”

He bent his head and kissed the side of her throat. She felt tension in his muscles, as if he was resisting her at the same time that he was kissing her. “Better to have the formula, just in case.”

“I wish—” She tilted her head back, her eyes closing, letting the pleasure of his mouth on her skin pulse through her, matching the deep half-imagined contractions of the athanor. “Oh, Ruan, I wish—”

“Wish what?” He ran his hands over her shoulders and down her arms. The tension had dissolved away. They had become so accustomed to each other that the slightest touch, the slightest change of body temperature or position, had meaning.

“That you would give up your determination to kill the grand duke. Leave it to the cardinal. Now that the little prince is dead, the grand duke is determined to make Don Antonio his heir, and the cardinal will never allow that to happen.”

He stepped back. As warm as the cellar was, it made her feel cold all of a sudden when his body was not close behind hers.

“Have you forgotten Isabella's death? Forgotten how he allowed her body to be abused? Forgotten Dianora's death as well?”

“No. But—”

“And the grand duchess? Have you forgotten how he shamed her, and in the end how his mistress was the instrument of her death? Have you forgotten the tales of how he got his changeling brat, with who knows how many people dead to conceal the plot?”

“No. Ruan—”

“Have you forgotten the Pucci conspiracy and the months, the years of terror that came after it? Have you forgotten your own Nonna, escaping from Florence by the skin of her teeth?”

“No!” She turned to face him, tears starting from her eyes. “I haven't forgotten and I'll never forget. How can you think that? The grand duke will pay for his sins—he'll burn in hell forever with Bianca Cappello beside him, and he'll pay in this world too, see if he doesn't. The cardinal—”

“I do not care what the cardinal intends. I have sworn to kill Francesco de' Medici with my own hands, and I will keep my promise.”

He stepped back again, farther away from her. The shadows gathered around his face, giving his eyes their old look of bottomless black sadness. The sound of the fire hissing inside the athanor, faint as it was, seemed to fill the cellar.

“Ruan, it has been so long,” she whispered. “I'm different, you're different. I'm just—I'm afraid for you.”

“Afraid for me?” His voice became harder. “I will tell you just how easy it will be. He considers himself to be safe at the Villa di Pratolino—he and Donna Bianca go about with only a guard or two, or no guards at all. I can have them both dead in bed and be gone long before their bodies are discovered.”

She stared at him open-mouthed.

“You think I have not planned it, over and over, while I have been waiting for you to make your choice? It has been three years and more, Chiara. And if you fear for my immortal soul, well, there is already blood enough on my hands.”

He held out his hands, ridged with the scars of his childhood in the mines. The flickering light of the lanterns played over his palms. There was no blood on his hands, despite his confessions. Only hardened, flexible skin that had stroked over her own skin, over every secret place of her. Only warm skin that had caressed and coaxed her to heights of pleasure she never knew existed.

She couldn't think of anything to say.

He stepped closer and put his hands on her shoulders again. He waited. For what? Did he expect her to shudder with hatred and push him away? Did she want to push him away? Blood on his hands there was, and more blood there would be, the grand duke's blood unless the cardinal got to him first. Even so—even so, saints and angels, she loved him so much.

Remember
, Babbo's voice whispered. She hadn't heard it in so long, and it wasn't a demon's voice anymore, just Babbo's voice, sad and faint.
Remember. You yourself swore to take vengeance on Bianca Cappello, for her part in the grand duchess's death. You are not so different from him
.

“We are what we are,” Ruan said. He put his hands under her arms and lifted her, swung her around to press her against the rough stone of the cellar's wall. “Tell me to stop if you can.”

“Never,” she gasped. She clung to his shoulders, sinking her nails into the workman's leather of his doublet. He pulled up her skirts as if she was a woman of the streets, in a hidden alleyway. She didn't care. “If we burn in hell, we'll burn together. Ahhh—”

She threw back her head and cried out with sensation as he thrust himself into her. Her body shuddered with ecstasy. He bent his head and sank his teeth into her neck as he jolted her hard against the wall, over and over, every breath hoarse with effort. She screamed, and screamed again.

“Ruan. Ruan. Holy Mother of God, Nonna and Lucia will think you're killing me.”

“They know what I am doing to you.”

“Cinto, then.”

“If he so much as rattles the lock on the door I'll whip him through the streets.”

He lifted her higher. The stone wall scraped her back, and she felt one of her sleeves tear away from the bodice of her gown. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She wrapped her legs around his waist and gave herself up to him.

“
My a'th kar
,”
he said, soft and harsh, deep in his throat. “Always and forever.”

The athanor smoldered on the table, making its faint hissing sound. She heard it, and then she didn't hear it anymore.

“I wish I could be perfect for you,” he said after a while, when the first frantic violence had passed and they were moving together, gently and sweetly as two waves curling around each other to make a whirlpool, slow and deep in the brine of the ocean. “Without flaw, sinless and good. But I never was. Even as a child, I never was.”

“I know.”

“I will wait, for three days and no more. I will speak to the cardinal if I can—surely he will return to Florence to console his brother upon this terrible loss. But I cannot promise you, Chiara, that I will not take my vengeance with my own hands. I have waited for it too long.”

“I know. I understand.”

“I have waited for you, too.”

“You have me.”

“No. Not completely.”

She closed her eyes and imagined herself leaving Florence. Oh, the scent of the Arno, the marketplaces on the bridges, bright with color, noisome with fish and fruit, loud with bargaining and the crying of wares. The tall tall bell tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the dome of the Basilica, rose-red in the sunrise and frescoed inside with the Last Judgment in a hundred thousand different colors. The streets and piazzas, each one unique. The shop with its secrets and sorrows. Nonna, blind now and frail, wishing every day that her Lord would come for her. Lucia and Mattea, yes, even Lucia and Mattea, her sisters, her blood.

All of it, all of them, on one side of the scale.

On the other side, Ruan.

What would she choose?

“We are what we are,” Chiara said softly, her lips against his throat. “I wouldn't want it to be different.”