The Red Lily Crown (37 page)

The Monastery of the Santissima Annunziata, called Le Murate

19 DECEMBER 1584

“T
he grand duchess is here,” the portress said. She was flushed and her eyes were bright with self-importance. “The grand duchess her very self, and she demands to speak with you.”

Chiara's first thought was
but the grand duchess is dead
.

From the Grand Duchess Giovanna her mind jumped to Rostig and Seiden, who had slipped away quietly within a day of one another in the warm days of high summer. Safe with their mistress now, who had loved them so dearly. The old dogs led her thoughts to the shop, and Nonna—oh, Nonna—and Ruan. From there she worked her way back to the rooms on the Via di Mezzo and the lemon-house at the Villa di Pratolino, and at last she reached Bianca Cappello.

“She can demand all she wants.” Chiara turned back to folding clean tunics. It was so cold in the laundry she could see her breath when she spoke. Vivi had made herself a warm nest in a basket of linens waiting to be washed. The head laundress hated it when she did that, and Vivi had learned to do it only when Chiara was alone in the laundry. “I won't go.”

The portress went away. After a few minutes she came back with two of the lay sisters, the biggest and strongest.

“The grand duchess demands to speak with you,” she repeated. “If you do not come, you will be taken.”

Chiara finished folding the last tunic. Refusing to go wasn't worth being dragged off like a sack of meal. She shrugged and followed the portress. She had never been to the parlors, not in the whole—two years? three years?—she'd been at Le Murate. Time ran together and blurred when the days were all the same, with only the Sundays and the
sonnodolce
to look forward to. The grand duke's physician brought a new bottle from time to time, and at first he'd asked questions, sharp ones, about alchemy and the
Lapis Philosophorum
. The last time, though, there'd been no questions, as if suddenly the grand duke didn't care anymore.

Or couldn't care anymore.

She remembered almost everything now, from the rainy morning she'd offered the grand duke Babbo's silver descensory, to the moment she'd stepped down the first few steps into the bookshop's cellar and seen Cinto with the heart of the universe in his hands. She hadn't told anybody, not even dear Donna Jimena, that she'd remembered so much.

Vivi jumped out of her warm pile of laundry and followed them down the flagged corridor, her claws clicking on the stone.

In the parlor, Bianca Cappello sat upright in a cushioned, gilded chair, with another cushion for her embroidered slippers to rest upon. Fires burned in two braziers, giving warmth and light. An iron grille separated her from the single low, roughly made bench on the nuns' bare, cold side of the parlor.

She was dressed in white-and-gold satin, and wrapped up warmly in a mantle of green velvet quilted with gold thread and embroidered with pearls. It was lined with some kind of glossy dark fur and clasped with jeweled gold animals' heads. Her hair was red, unnaturally bright, bound up with more pearls and ruby clips worked in the shape of red lilies.

Chiara didn't sit down. She didn't say a word. Vivi sat beside her.

“How gaunt and worn you look, Mona Chiara,” the grand duchess said. She sounded pleased about it. “Ten years older, at least. I would not have known you, if it were not for your little hound.”

Chiara said, “What do you want?”

“No curtsy? No Serenissima? I have been told you lost your reason after your injuries—do you even know who I am?”

“I know who you are.”

“Do you know why I am here?”

Chiara said nothing.

“Well, then,” the grand duchess said, leaning back in her chair and stretching like a fleshy, glittering, henna-haired cat, “I will tell you why I have come. I want the stone you call the
Lapis Philosophorum
.”

“I wondered when someone would ask again,” Chiara said. “I don't have it.”

“Oh, but you do. You created it, in the cellar of your father's bookshop, and with it you killed your grandmother, your sister, and your brother-in-law.”

“I didn't kill them,” Chiara said. Her hands started to shake, and she put them behind her back. Vivi shifted slightly, gathering herself. “And I didn't create anything.”

Cinto with something unimaginably bright in his hands, melting into his flesh. His eyes wide, his mouth screaming.

The world ending.

I did, she thought. For a few seconds, anyway.

“That is a lie,” Bianca Cappello said. “You stole elements and materials from the grand duke's laboratory at the Villa di Pratolino. He told me the story—how he came upon you in the very moment you were doing it. You told some foolish lie about a gift for the Grand Duchess Giovanna's new baby, and he believed you at the time. But when you created such an unnatural blast? When you walked away from it untouched? He knew then what you had done.”

“I wasn't untouched,” Chiara said. “You said it yourself—I lost my reason. I look ten years older, at least.”

The grand duchess leaned forward. “Even so. You should be dead and you are not. The wreck of your shop has been searched and searched again, and every inch of the monastery. You have hidden the stone by some magical means, and I require it, Mona Chiara. I require it now.”

“Why?”

“So you do have it.”

“I didn't say that. I just wondered why you wanted it. Why the grand duke's own physician stopped asking for it, and why you're asking for it now.”

“I can have you beaten until you tell me. Le Murate is under the patronage of the Medici, and the abbess will do whatever I direct her to do.”

“Beat me all you want. I don't have it.”

The grand duchess stood up and paced back and forth in the little parlor, her heavy brows slanting down over her eyes in anger—and terror? Why terror? Her velvet and fur and silk made wild-animal rustling noises. Watching her through the grille, Chiara thought suddenly that it was the grand duchess who was in a cage. Why did she want the
Lapis Philosophorum
now?

“He is sick,” the grand duchess said. “The grand duke.”

Chiara's thoughts stopped. They still did that sometimes. She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her strength. Part of her wanted to go back to the laundry-room where everything was simple and clear, wood-ashes and hot water and lye and heavy wet linens, over and over again until the day she died. But another part of her wanted to cultivate her renewed memories, even if they were poison. Even if they did draw her back into the deadly labyrinth of the Medici.

“It is not a secret at the court,” Bianca Cappello said, “although you would not have heard it here, walled in as you are. Yes, he has had a few small strokes of apoplexy, as his father had before him. He is perfectly well now, but I must have the stone to be certain that he remains well.”

She was lying when she said he was perfectly well. If he was perfectly well, she would not have come.

“When he dies,” Chiara said, “the people of Florence will drive you out of the city, crown or no crown—you and your changeling son.”

The grand duchess came up close to the grille and grasped the bars with her hands. She had two or three rings on every finger. Her fingernails were bitten down to nothing. Even the skin of her fingertips was ragged and reddened.

“Prince Antonio is the heir,” she said. “He has been legitimated—it is legal and finished. He will rule after his father, and even the cardinal can do nothing about it.”

If Francesco is fool enough to legitimate the Venetian's changeling brat, I will have the boy strangled. I will never allow a bastard without a drop of Medici blood to inherit our crown
.

Another memory. The Vasari Corridor, of course. The loggia looking out over the church. Cardinal Prince Ferdinando de' Medici with his pink cheeks and merry eyes, who had forced her to spy for him and absolved her from her vow of virginity, all in the space of half an hour.

“You might be surprised,” she said, “what the cardinal can do about things. If you're so sure your boy will succeed, why do you care if the grand duke dies?”

Suddenly the grand duchess shook the grille as if she had gone mad. It was ancient and it rattled. Flakes of rust fell off. Vivi came to her feet and barked.

“Will no one ever
believe
,” Bianca Cappello said, “that I love him?”

Chiara didn't believe it. She said nothing.

“Oh, not the grand duke. Not Francesco de' Medici. But Franco—tell me, Mona Chiara, as intimate as you once were with both of us. Do you know who Franco is?”

“It's a pet name you call the grand duke.”

“It is more than a pet name. Franco is—a different person. Franco is—what the grand duke might have been, if he had not been born to wear the red lily crown of Tuscany.”

“Is it Franco who whips you?” Chiara said viciously. “Ties you up like a lamb to be slaughtered? Makes you crawl to him like a gutter whore?”

Bianca Cappello let go of the grille and stepped back. The rust had left reddish-brown marks on her fingers, like old scars.

“Yes,” Chiara said. “I know. I lived in the Palazzo Pitti, in your own household. How could I help but know?”

“She has done many wicked things,” Bianca Cappello said. It took Chiara a moment to realize that she was talking about herself. “She deserves to be punished, to make fair payment for her sins.”

Skidding and stumbling down the polished stone stairs in the Palazzo Vecchio, trying to catch the grand duchess's skirts, her mantle, anything to break the fall. The grand duchess turning over and over, in eerie silence, until she struck the stone floor at the bottom of the stairway.

“There is no fair payment for your sins,” Chiara said. “Whatever you call yourself. No fair payment but death.”

Bianca Cappello stared at her for a moment. A shudder ran through her, as if she felt cold despite the fires and her sumptuous furs. She pulled her mantle closer around her body. “The stone,” she said. “That is all I want from you, Mona Chiara. Give it to me, and I will see you have comforts in exchange. Leisure. Luxuries. Books.”

Not, Chiara thought, freedom. But then I just threatened her life. She said, “I told you. I don't have it.”

“Your conspirator, your lover, the Englishman. Suppose I were to tell you the truth about what happened to him.”

Chiara's heart stopped. Everything stopped. She couldn't breathe. How much time passed? She never knew.

In a voice that didn't sound like her own she said, “He abandoned me and went home to Cornwall. That's what happened to him.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Then he is dead.”

“Perhaps not.”

Ruan holding out his arms, half-questioning, half-demanding. She herself running straight to him as if she had been doing it all her life. His arms around her as if he would set her apart from the rest of the world forever
 . . .

Her eyes filled with tears she couldn't control. They spilled over and streaked down her cheeks like fire. For a moment she couldn't speak at all. All her hard-won strength, her recovered memories, her determination to be herself again, seemed like dust in her hands. She whispered, “Tell me. Please.”

“Give me the stone.”

“I can't. I don't have it.”

The grand duchess went to the door and knocked once. It was opened immediately by one of the lay sisters.

“Send a messenger if you change your mind,” she said. “If you do not give me the stone, Mona Chiara, you will live out your dreary life as a washerwoman here in Le Murate. And you will never know the truth about the grand duke's English alchemist.”

The Monastery of the Santissima Annunziata, called Le Murate

9 SEPTEMBER 1587

T
he abbess of Le Murate was not one to allow pearls, however insignificant, to be cast before swine. When she learned Chiara could read and write—not only read and write, but read and write
Latin
, and why had no one told her this before?—she removed her from the laundry-room and set her to assisting the copyist nuns in making the hand-lettered psalters and books of hours that brought the monastery a good part of its income. At first Chiara's work was poor, because her hands were so badly damaged by her work in the laundry. After a year or so, with warm wrappings in the winter and liberal applications of goose grease every night, her skin became soft again and her fingers—barring the broken ones—flexible.

Vivi missed the baskets of laundry where she had liked to make snug nests. She was eleven years old now—in the copyists' room Chiara finally had access to calendars—and not as lively as she had once been. The copyist nuns remembered Rostig and Seiden, and were delighted to have a russet-eared hound in their midst again. They made beds from folded blankets, and brought treats from the refectory. As Vivi's face grew whiter, her little body grew plumper. She did her tricks for the nuns, and slept every night curled at the foot of Chiara's own pallet.

The grand duchess didn't come to Le Murate again.

The rumors of the grand duke's strokes of apoplexy simmered and simmered and eventually bubbled over, even inside the monastery. His right hand was contracted into a claw, one nun whispered, and when he signed his name he produced an unreadable scribble. Another added that her sister had seen him with her own eyes, and his face appeared to droop on the right side. Still another, citing her cousin's shoemaker who was also the grand duke's personal shoemaker, swore the grand duke wore a special shoe on his right foot to allow him to stand upright.

Chiara lay awake at night, making and unmaking plans. Send a message to the grand duchess agreeing to give her the
Lapis Philosophorum
. Give her an ordinary stone from the cloister walk, find out the truth about Ruan, and somehow, before the deception was uncovered, work out a way to escape. But then—then what? She had nowhere to go. She had no
sonnodolce
of her own, and she would die or go mad once and for all without the drug. She couldn't leave Le Murate without Vivi, and how would she take care of her? How could she leave Donna Jimena, growing older and frailer, whose only pleasure in life was to talk about the old days and her beloved Isabella?

Time slipped away. Donna Jimena died and no one but Chiara cared. No one was left to care. So much for the noble blood that had been Donna Jimena's pride and joy. She was buried beneath the apse of the church in the communal crypt where the lay sisters were commonly buried. Her name wasn't engraved anywhere. She was simply gone.

I am Donna Jimena Osorio, related by blood to the late Duchess Donna Eleonora of Toledo. She invited me to Florence to manage her daughter Donna Isabella's household, and so I have done with all my heart, for thirty years and more
. . . .

Every Sunday after Mass Chiara knelt in the apse and prayed for her. She prayed for Nonna and Lucia, for Grand Duchess Giovanna and little Prince Filippino, for Isabella and Dianora, so long in their graves. So many dead. She prayed for Ruan Pencarrow, too—whether he was alive or dead, she loved him and she still dreamed about him. When she was finished with her prayers, she let a drop of
sonnodolce
fall on her skin. That was one thing that never varied—the grand duke's physician appeared two or three times a year with a fresh supply.

She began to believe that she would live out the rest of her life in Le Murate.

One warm September morning she was copying a psalm into a psalter.
In deficiendo ex me spiritum meum
, she wrote carefully,
et tu cognovisti semitas meas. In via hac, qua ambulabam, absconderunt laqueum mihi
.

Though my spirit may become faint within me, even then, you have known my paths. Along this way, which I have been walking, they have hidden a snare for me. . . .

Two of the lay sisters came into the copyists' room. Neither one said anything. One of them picked Vivi up without taking any care not to hurt her, and Vivi yelped in surprise and pain and outrage. Chiara jumped to her feet, scattering pens and ink pots, but the second lay sister caught hold of her arms and held her back as the first one walked out of the room with Vivi under her arm. The copyist nuns sat stunned, their mouths open, without a sound.

“You can't take her!” Chiara shouted. “What's the matter with you? She's doing no harm. Bring her back at once, and don't you dare hurt her or I'll go to the abbess.”

“Abbess's own orders,” the lay sister said. She pushed Chiara away, hard enough that Chiara stumbled against the writing-table and fell to her knees. “Grand duchess is here and wants the dog. Says you can see her in the first parlor, if you want.”

Chiara scrambled to her feet, ducked under the lay sister's meaty arm, and ran out of the room. The first parlor was on the other side of the cloister walk.
You can't have her you can't have her you can't have her
, she sobbed through her clenched teeth as she ran. She burst into the nuns' side of the parlor and flung herself against the grille.

On the other side, the grand duchess was just buckling a new leather collar on Vivi's neck, gilded and painted with red and blue stripes and red fleurs-de-lis. Vivi's ears were pinned back and her tail was tucked between her hind legs. When she saw Chiara she howled, a hoarse pitiful cry unlike anything Chiara had ever heard before.

“You can't have her,” Chiara panted. “May you be damned to hell, Bianca Cappello, she is all I have left—you can't have her.”

“As you yourself can see, Mona Chiara, I can.” The grand duchess clipped a leash on Vivi's new collar and sat back in her chair. “Now, let us talk again about what you did in the cellar under your father's bookshop.”

Chiara closed her eyes and tried to breathe. Screaming and shaking the grille wouldn't help. Think, think—what was different? Why had the grand duchess suddenly come to the monastery again, after all this time? Why was she so desperate that she would stoop to taking a little dog—

Desperate.

Chiara opened her eyes and looked, really looked at Bianca Cappello. It had been almost three years since she had seen her last, in this very parlor, and the grand duchess had aged badly. She had lost her lush plumpness and her face sagged under its thick layer of pink-and-white ceruse. Her hair, dressed in a high elaborate style with ropes of pearls, was too perfect. A wig, then.

His right hand was contracted into a claw . . . his face appeared to droop on the right side . . . he wore a special shoe on his right foot to allow him to stand upright
.

Chiara said bluntly, “Is he dying?”

“I will not let him die,” the grand duchess said. “He is a young man yet, ten years younger than his father was when he died, and his father died before his time. He will live, my Franco, because you will give me your stone.”

“Serenissima,” Chiara said. She was willing to give Bianca Cappello the form of address that meant so much to her, if it would get Vivi back. “I would give you the stone if I had it, I swear by all the saints and angels.”

“It is not the apoplexies,” the grand duchess said. Her voice shook. “Those come and go, and although he has some ill effects, they are not enough to kill him. But this summer—it has been wet and hot and his tertian fever is worse than I have ever seen it. He has no strength to fight it, and it breaks my heart to see him suffer so.”

She wasn't just saying it. She meant it. For all her sins and selfishness and cruelty, she loved her Franco.

“His brother is coming from Rome. The cardinal. He writes that he wishes to make amends with Francesco for their differences, while they both still live. I am afraid of him.”

As well you should be, Chiara thought.

“Francesco must regain his health. That is the only answer. The physicians are useless. The other alchemists are useless. You, Mona Chiara, you are my only hope.”

“I can't help you. Vivi can't help you. Please, Serenissima, give her back to me.”

“When you give me the stone. Only then.”

Chiara looked down. She didn't want the grand duchess to see her eyes and guess what she was about to do. Carelessly, as if it meant nothing, she said, “If anyone has created the
Lapis Philosophorum
, it is the grand duke's English alchemist.”

“Francesco has questioned him, over and over. He—”

She stopped.

Chiara looked up. She felt as if she could burn through the grille with her eyes alone. “So he is alive,” she said.

The grand duchess stood up and jerked Vivi's leash tight. The little hound choked and whimpered. “The unnatural blast,” she said, her voice hard again, “was in your father's bookshop. You stole valuable elements from the grand duke and created it. The grand duke believes the English alchemist helped you, and that is why he has kept him a prisoner and questioned him endlessly. But I think he is wrong. I think you created the magical stone, Mona Chiara. You, and no one else.”

And here I am at the end of the circle, Chiara thought. That was my dream. To show Babbo. To be known and acknowledged as the greatest female alchemist since Perenelle Flamel. Now I've achieved it and it's going to cost me everything.

Unless—

Unless I can do it again.
Nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo
. Black, white, yellow, red. Babbo's book is gone but it was an old formula. I might be able to find it again in another book, in the grand duke's library. If I can find it, I might be able to make the
Lapis Philosophorum
again. I might—

“Don't hurt Vivi,” she said. “Don't let the grand duke do harm to Magister Ruanno. The stone that I made in the bookshop's cellar is gone, but I can make another one. All I need is the grand duke's library, so I can find the formula again. Then a laboratory, and equipment, and elements. I need to be released from Le Murate, and I can make the
Lapis Philosophorum
again.”

The grand duchess looked at her steadily. After what seemed to be an eternity she nodded.

“I will make the arrangements,” she said. “Do not think you can deceive me, Mona Chiara. You will be watched every moment, and if you do not create that stone for me, I will see that you regret it.”

She went out. Vivi struggled with the leash, crying. Bianca Cappello struck her sharply with the doubled-over end of the leash to make her obey.

Chiara watched them go, helpless and with murder in her heart.