Wolves in Winter (11 page)

When I considered what Maestro Ficino had recognised in me, I knew that Margherita had seen it too. Her
grullo
tales of wood ladies and mermaids suddenly seemed to make sense, and there
appeared little difference, to me, between her harmless conjurings and the more august researches of the Maestro, for all that hers were cast from a bundle of rubbish and his with the latest
instruments that scholarship could provide. She too had believed in the powers of nature, like ginger in crystals to heat the blood, that a menstruating woman would cloud a mirror, that vinegar
could cool a husband’s temper or asparagus rouse him to ardour.

Why then had Piero de Medici chosen to go to Margherita in his fear instead of his household
magus
? I saw little of Piero, and what I did see I could not like. I saw that he was lazy,
that he left most of the work to his secretary Bibbiena, and a roomful of scribes; that he was vain, caring more for ordering new clothes to show off his fine physique; and that he was proud,
believing the Medici to be as great as his wife’s family, the Orsini, who had been grand in Rome for centuries while the Medici were no better than peasants in the marshy countryside of the
Mugello. Oh, he liked to play the scholar, determined to show the world he was as great and discerning a critic of the new arts as his father Lorenzo had been. But I could see his eyes wandering
when he came to discourse with Maestro Ficino, trying to catch a glimpse of his latest velvet coat in the reflection of a brass bowl; and I pitied my teacher then, for I saw that for all their
learning, the scholars of the Medici household were just another sort of slave, bound to their books for their living as I had been bound to the greens and the sacks of capers.

Why then had Piero indulged Maestro Ficino in his protection of me? I should have liked to speak to Cecco of these things, but it never seemed to come out right. His worship of Piero was as
complete as his conviction of my own odd specialness, however much I tried to convince him that I knew nothing, could do nothing. In Cecco’s mind, the fact that Piero had needed me made it
so. And I knew that I
was
strange. What was it that had so frightened the people in the marketplace, that had convinced my father I could execute the trick that bought my life, that made
Adara so keen to abandon me? And I thought of the travelling people and the poor, sorry wolf, and how I had made him come to me.

One afternoon after dinner, when the house was quiet, I stole tentatively into Donna Alfonsina’s rooms. She and her ladies would be resting, I thought, and if not I could invent an errand
– for though I saw her often, sweeping like a proud ghost through the palazzo, she did not know me. All of us in the household moved on our own trajectories, like clockwork dolls, crossing
paths occasionally but always proceeding along our proper course. Her chambers were on the floor above Piero’s, a long suite of painted rooms glowing vivid as a jewel box. There was a scent
of apple wood from the fire and fine incense, and my feet moved silently, cushioned by a thick crimson Turkey carpet. Other carpets were spread along a table and benches, their colours picked out
in a row of silver basins ranged on a shelf. There were several books, embroidery frames and instruments scattered about, and I smiled at myself that I had once thought the salon above a brothel in
Toledo a palace. Everything in this warm, luxurious space hummed quietly with money. In the corner of the antechamber was a huge mirror, from Venice, I thought, the city of water where the most
beautiful glass in the world was made. Standing before it, I took off my cloak and my old red dress and my shift, and looked at myself naked, as I had never done before.

I was a poor thing, that was for sure. My hip bones and collarbones poked out, I could work my fist in the gap between my thighs, though I turned my eyes shyly from the smooth place between my
legs. I was all straight lines and angles. I knew enough from my time with Margherita of some men’s desires, that they preferred their own sex to the other, though my mind shied away from
those foul moments with the gentleman in Adara’s house. I was a between thing, I thought, and that was why they had dressed me as a boy. ‘Changeling’, they called me. Well, I
thought, there was time for growing, and I tried to find my papa’s voice, my papa who had told me I was beautiful, special. He must have loved me very much, I thought, to say such things with
the evidence of my ugliness plain before his eyes. I sighed a little as I dropped my shift over my meagre limbs and thought I would pay a visit to Margherita. Perhaps amongst her
‘kindnesses’ there might be something to make a girl into a woman. Besides, I had meant to visit for a long time, ashamed of myself that I had neglected her. At dinner, when we were
served a sweet
frittata
with candied cherries, I cut off a slice and wrapped it in a cloth for her.

Winter was coming on and the lost heat of the summer was almost unimaginable now that the city had sunk in freezing, icy mist. I made my way to Santo Spirito through a ghost city, the fog so
thick and white that the streets vanished a few yards before me. Only the lanterns in the tabernacles at the corners – lighted early to guide the bumping, cursing citizens – helped me
down to the river. Margherita was not there, nor was there any sign of her precious heap of smelly treasures. I thought perhaps the chill had driven her away, to a snugger roosting place, and I
looked around me to ask after her, holding my drooping slice of omelette like a torch. A barrow man came up out of the mist, the heavy wheels of his laden handcart almost crushing my boots, and I
jumped back, recognising the cricket seller who had handed over my gift that last spring. I asked him politely if he had any news of Suora Margherita and he answered me twisting his cap, taking me
for a young lady in my new clothes, not recognising the shock-headed sprite in the gaudy necklace who had kept company with the wise woman.

‘If you’ve come to ask something of her, miss, it’s too late. She’s been gone a month or so now.’

‘Gone where, if you please?’

‘Hell, I imagine, begging your pardon. Or the Bargello at least.’

I knew of the dungeon beneath the fortress of the Bargello. Cecco had told me about the tiny cells there, the prisoners who wasted away for years without a glimpse of sunlight.

‘But why? What had she done? She meant no harm.’

The man leaned towards me and tapped his nose confidentially.

‘Enemies in high places, miss. It was Piero’s men what came for her, curse him for a tyrant. You could try Donna Ciliego, over at Santa Annunziata, I’ve heard she’s very
good.’

I stared after him as he heaved his barrow across the deserted piazza, vanishing into the thick whiteness. Margherita had known Piero. She had known, as I had not, the significance of that
little shattered ball. And perhaps the Medici fortunes were doubtful enough for it to be unwise even to let a crazy old conjuror who lived in a doorway speak freely. Poor, poor Margherita. I
regretted that I had not sought her out sooner, but I knew well that I was too insignificant to have done anything to save her. I saw too that Piero was ruthless, and that his fear would make him
cruel. As I trailed back to the palazzo, I thought angrily on how little we mattered to the great people, who thought human beings could be owned and discarded like broken tools.

I told Cecco that I thought Margherita had been locked up, but he refused to believe it. She would be back with the swallows, he told me, and said I should not mind it.

‘Besides, it’s not Ser Piero’s fault,’ he said stoutly, ‘the people are stupid. They want tournaments and feasts and all suchlike nonsense, and because Ser Piero
can’t pay for that they go listening to that creep Savonarola.’
Piagnoni
, he called the Florentines, snivellers.

Piero was unpopular in Florence. There were many who resented the Medici merchants who had set themselves up as princes. And the city was threatened, Cecco said, by the Milanese and the
French.

‘Why Milan?’ I asked. We were sharing the sweet omelette, there seemed no point in wasting it.

Cecco sighed and rolled his eyes. He enjoyed reminding me of my ignorance. ‘The Duke of Milan is a halfwit. They say he lives in filth, with only his dogs for company. Milan is ruled by
his uncle, Lodovico. They call him
Il Moro
– moor, like you.’

The idiot boy, he explained, cared nothing for his position so long as the uncle kept him supplied with pleasures; but his wife, a princess of Naples, who certainly did care for her dignity, was
outraged that Lodovico’s son was treated as the heir to Milan rather than her own boy.

‘So the King of Naples is planning to march to Milan to protect her honour and make good her rights,’ said Cecco. ‘And Il Moro has asked Piero to join with him against
Naples.’

If Piero was not loved, nor did he have the money to buy fear. The vast Medici vaults, to which all the kings of Europe had once been in debt, lay empty and cobwebbed.

‘What have the French got to do with it?’

‘Just as well for you that one of us has ears on his head. The French have a
claim
to Naples. They can make an alliance with Milan, give the dukedom to Il Moro, and put their own
king on the throne. They say he’s a hunchback, the French king.’

Thresholds are special places. Between inside and outside, public and private; the border between safety and danger, between different selves. Everywhere in the palazzo, the doorways and
lintels, ledges and stair-treads were carved and decorated with stories for those who traced them over the stone. I had seen already how the house was divided, how the kitchen folk were invisible
to the family who lived above. Only the faintest of traces showed where their treadings had crossed, just as deer and boar make tracks through a forest and never quite meet. I had known the
kitchens. The streets were a second world, where I walked with Cecco, gobbling saffron cakes and raisins, a world of sober clad merchants who moved with the pulse of money through the stony gunnels
of the city’s veins. We saw scrawling in the alleyways – ‘People and Liberty’.

As the streets grew clogged with snow, there was hunger in Florence. More and more penitents turned out to hear the preaching of Savonarola. Florence was a city built on sin, he claimed. The
Medici had tried to wash their usurers’ wealth in beauty, transferring their wicked gold to the statues and paintings which made the city famous – but was it not a sin, Savonarola
asked, that the rich should walk in scarlet, drunk on the imagined perfections of their hired artists, whilst the poor starved beneath the walls of their treasure houses? The sword of God, he
railed, would descend from over the Alps, slicing off the diseased limbs of Italy like a surgeon’s blade.

Piero’s, of course, was the greatest treasure house of all. The palazzo was another world, bright yet untouchable, where I glimpsed Piero in his court of power, and the
scrittoio
was the last, a
hortus conclusus
, a walled garden, Maestro Ficino called it, shut off from politics and money and the business of living, where all that mattered were the spirits of the
books. A garden, he said, but I thought it more like a bird’s nest, a bundle of stealings, with my master pecking at his manuscripts like a greedy magpie. He paid no mind to the news from
Milan, or the stories of the French, or the fresh talk of the streets, nor yet to the passage of the envoys on the staircase beyond his door. He would forget to eat, Cecco said, if his plate was
not pushed in front of him.

While the other worlds of the city moved through their thresholds for wealth or places, or simple hunger, Maestro Ficino governed each moment of his day by the stars. He wanted to cast my chart,
and grumped when I told him I could not remember my birthday. He had been born, he said, with Aquarius nearly square to Mars in Scorpio. ‘Saturn set the seal of melancholy on me from the
beginning,’ he explained. Those born in the first month of the year were inclined to an excess of black bile, to be removed by warm spices and bleeding (though for himself he found that wine
cured it better). This was his little joke, he gave it every day at dinnertime, and I was always sure to smile, for I saw that he was a kind man in his way, so gentle and refined.

He questioned me over and over about my father’s books, for his plan, he said, was to gather together the greatest collection in the world of the writings of the philosopher Plato, and
translate them into Latin to continue in the glorious tradition of Piero’s father. Plato was the last of the line that had come through Trismegistus to Orpheus to Pythagoras to Philolaus,
names that I had absorbed even through my sleep as my father and his friends talked around the fire. I did not see that Maestro Ficino cared too much for the glories of Piero, nor much for the good
and true properties of things – for healing, like my father; rather, he cared for what was beyond them.

The only power that interested my master lay between the stars and the things of the world – properties, he called them – which bound the celestial and the terrestrial. He was an
accomplished musician, believing that the soft stirrings of his harp might echo the movements of the planets: Jupiter was ‘earnest and sweet’, Venus ‘wanton and soft’. All
this he showed me on his charts, to teach me. He had me mix scent for him, heating rose oil and dried jasmine flowers, to burn in a pure alabaster perfume-cup, and brew white sugar and cinnamon, as
being the pure foods that would help him lift his mind to the spirits. While Cecco copied and sighed, and blotted his freckles with ink, I measured and stirred and listened, so far as I could
follow him.

Like my father, he believed that there was nothing sinful in knowledge, that witchcraft was a coarse word, and that seeking the divine alignments of the elements was the most proper pursuit for
scholars. I hope I was an apt pupil, difficult as I often found it to follow his thoughts. It was agreeable to be there, soft work; and when he set to reading or making his notes on the letters
that came daily from all over the world, I set to my own learning. I repeated the names of plants and herbs, tracing their pictures in his diagrams of bright-coloured ink, learning how they should
be treated to bring out their kindness. We sat thus for hours, each day, but still I was always glad when he waved his hand to dismiss me and I could set out with Cecco under the gateway of the
palazzo to that other world beyond.