Wolves in Winter (20 page)

‘And what might you see?’

‘Oh,’ I said slyly. ‘Weddings, and such things, you know. Venus riding on a stag with her hair all unbound, holding an apple and a flower garland. Love. Abundance. Those
things.’

‘Is that so? Well, we shall see, shall we, little witch?’

Witch
was not a good word. Witch was a word of howling crowds and spitting priests and cells and flames. Witch was the thin line trodden by Margherita and her kind, who took refuge in
madness. Witch was what we had fled, my old master and I, when I pushed him out of a window in Florence and made him fly to the ground.
Maligno, demonio
. But in her pretty mouth it had a
sweet sound, not ‘Moor’, not nothing, but a name made just for me.

The turn of a season is an odd time, a perilous time. As the winds shifted and grew colder, changing the pressures of the air, Caterina’s youngest child, Bernadino, fell sick. I had seen
little of her six children. Of those she had borne to her first husband, the eldest – the Pope’s nephew, Ottaviano, who one day would rule Forli and Imola – was training as a
soldier, whilst her second boy was in orders, and her daughter, Bianca, already betrothed. Bernadino was about six, the child of handsome, low-born Feo. Feo had been as hated in Forli as Riario
and, like Riario, the people had murdered him. The Countess had wreaked terrible revenge upon them for their act.

The younger boys had their own household within the Paradiso, where my lady would visit them each day, and I never went there until a maid was sent for me in the
farmacia
to tell me that
the little boy lay ill with a high fever. The Countess’s ‘experiments’ were not merely for her own amusement. In the old-fashioned way, she doctored her family and her servants,
noting the success of her cures as my father had done, as I had done at Careggi. Yet she was gone to Imola with Ser Giovanni, to see after the last of the grain harvest, so there was a mutinous
look on the maid’s face; I could see she resented that I was being called to the Countess’s place.

Bernadino lay on a daybed in the nursery, with the shutters closed and the fire banked high as he sweated and trembled with the sickness. The nurse stood by with a wetted cloth, smoothing his
brow under damp gold hair the same colour as his mother’s. Though his eyes were glassy and far away and his face was wan, I saw that he was a pretty child. I put my hand to his temple and to
the fluttering throb in his wrist and asked the maid when it had come on.

‘He had a fever three days ago, but very slight. It had gone by evening.’ Her voice sounded close to tears, she was terrified that she might lose her place or worse if something
befell the child while his mother had left him in her care.

‘It is quartain then.’

The fever that creeps into the blood from wet marshy places, attacking every third day. Many are brought low with it in Italy, and whilst a grown person may wait out the cycle, I knew it could
be fatal for little ones. There was a seed my father had used to bring it off, swertia, ground with cloves and cinnamon; but I doubted I could find such a thing in Forli. It grew in the high
mountains of the East, where the silk for my mother’s wedding gown was made. Gentian was close to it, I would need that, and lemons, basil leaves, black peppercorns. I sent the maid to the
kitchens to ask after the fruit. She brought it to me in the
farmacia
, where I was roasting a spoon of alum on a metal plate. I ground it with the pepper and basil, and mixed in water and
lemon juice, adding a spoonful of honey to help the child swallow it down. I sent the nurse away.

‘I will sit with him.’

Just a little after he had taken the mixture his brow cooled and his pulse settled. I changed the pillow beneath his head and watched him sleep, wishing I knew some childish song, such as a
mother might sing, to comfort him. I opened the shutter a little to clear the air in the room and looked out across the walls at the city. I might be peaceful here. I might tend to the Countess and
work in the
farmacia
and wait quietly when she rode out hunting. I might walk to San Mercuriale and light a candle for poor Cecco’s soul. I felt the warmth of the fire spreading into
me, and contentment came with it. I knew I should never forget what I was, but I might grow a little more comfortable with it, grow to believe that here, perhaps, was a place for me in Forli. So I
sat and dozed through the night, making sure to administer the medicine at the sound of the first bell, and when I woke again there was the boy, bright eyed and laughing in his mother’s arms,
she all flushed and muddied from the fast ride from Imola, and covering her son with kisses.

Mora Buona
, she called me. Good Mora. But I liked
little witch
better.

*

One day my lady came to me as I was sorting her chemises for the laundress, running my hands over the delicate lawn, looking for tears or stains, and placed her hands over my
eyes.

‘What is it, Madonna? What’s the matter?’

She was giggling like a girl, delighted with herself.

‘Come, Mora. I have a present for you.’

I had not had a present since Adara gave me my lost doll. I stumbled before her, she guiding me so I did not fall. We passed through the sala, down the stairs to the hall where I smelled
roasting meat from the kitchens, out into the cold air. We crossed the courtyard, slick with wet, then turned towards the stables, passing through a door into a place which smelled not of leather
and animal sweat but clean and crisp, of soap and mint.

‘Look, Mora, look!’ She clapped her hands and when I saw what was there I began to cry. She had made a little room for me, with a settle and a table and a fireplace. There was a
quire of paper on the table, and an ink bottle and a box of quills. A package of books in oiled canvas, sealed with red wax. She danced around, showing me what she had sent for from Florence and
even Venice. The smell as I unwrapped the parcel was of my papa’s house and I cried all the harder, half in sadness and half with joy. There was a candlestick and a box of real wax candles
for when the winter days grew dim, an astrolabe and a cushion for my back.

‘Are you pleased, little witch? See, now you can cast your spells in peace!’

She was teasing me and I laughed with her as I went on my knees to thank her for her goodness to me. I was quite overcome. I was full of pride. I had a
studiolo
all of my own. I thought I
could write a letter to Maestro Ficino, to tell him how I did, and that he would be proud of me that my learning had brought such credit. I should sit in my own room, on my own seat and wait for a
letter in return. I could read and read, and learn Greek even, and write to scholars in far away lands as my papa had done.

That winter, I thought that the dreams, the black dreams, had finally vanished, replaced with visions of a future where I should be safe. I had my own room, here in the Rocca, and it did truly
seem a paradise to me. I was full of plans for what I should become, I thought even that I could send for one of the little Corsellini boys and have him to a student, so grand had I grown in my own
eyes. No one laughed at me now, and if there were some puzzled, jealous words from the Countess’s ladies I did not care for them, for she cared for me. I thought I was precious, as my papa
had told me, not for some old man’s fancy that my deformity made me a mystical prize, but for myself, for what I knew and how I could use it. For the first time since Adara carried me through
the streets of Toledo, I felt valued and safe.

But then the comet came.

*

For weeks after Twelfth Night, a blizzard enclosed Forli in an eerie snow-cloud, the roaring of thunder muffled by the incessant soft fall. We were cosy and merry enough in the
Rocca, though. The Countess kept the
cittadella
provisioned permanently for siege, and we were glad of it as the drifts banked up against the walls. There was music and dancing each evening
in the sala, and now I was no longer so awkward and fearful I quite enjoyed watching the ladies as they darted and spun. The Countess and Ser Giovanni would retire early to her apartments to
discuss their business. The grain accounts, she said, needed a great deal of attention. If the townsfolk were gossiping, her little court in the Rocca were mindful enough of her authority to
confine themselves to no more than knowing looks and smiles. Towards the end of the month, the snow cleared, but the sky darkened from the grey of a goose’s wing to the black of a
raven’s, so that we had to light torches even at noon, until the day when the countryside was lit up by a series of explosions, a giant’s firecrackers – and then even the Rocca
shook as the comet struck on a hillside just beyond the walls.

The Countess sent militiamen with shovels to clear a path that she might see for herself what had happened. She insisted I ride out with her to inspect the site where it seemed all the people of
Forli were gathered, fearful as to what the comet’s appearance might portend. They held up fragments from the fall as we passed, some three sided, like cracked iron, others as large and
lustrous as the Countess’s own famous pearls. The impact had hollowed out a great pit, as large as a house, into which the snowdrifts were already subsiding.

‘What does it mean, then, Mora?’ The Countess was turning to me, her tone light, but her gloved hands were playing tensely with the fur collar of her mantle. I wondered what answer
Maestro Ficino might give.

*

The rain is lashing the walls of the Rocca. Darkness, except where the booming guns find their targets and howls go up from the walls as figures collapse into invisibility.
Then fire, its orange glow silhouetting the swarming, desperate figures on the ramparts as the guns pound on, until suddenly the wall sways and bellies, the great stones seeming to hover, suspended
for a moment in nothingness until their weight brings them down and the fortress splits apart like an egg, bleeding fire. From the breach walk two men and a woman, her spine proudly erect, her
dress smeared with smoke and blood. Caterina. Her hair hangs forlornly down, plastered by the rain, but she holds her head up and does not look back at the dark shapes, firelight glinting on their
drawn swords, who swarm like ants into the crack. The man beside her attempts to take her arm- in support or in possession – but she shakes him off and continues, her amber eyes blind with
grief. Behind her, the second man, a dark blur in the darkness. Until the fire from the walls catches his face, the brim of the black hat hiding his eyes, but the mouth visible, smiling, a glint of
teeth as white as the pearl on his collar. Him.

*

The dream had come to me so quickly that I staggered a little, dizzied with it.

‘I think it means nothing, Madonna. These things are much more common than we suppose. Maestro Ficino would say—’

‘It is an ill omen.’

I closed my eyes, trying to blink away the image of the man in black following the Countess from the wreck of the Rocca.

‘If you’ll forgive me, my lady, I think not. Iron has many properties. It can bind spirits, drive away curses. Perhaps if the fragments were to be gathered together, blessed, this
might bring good fortune,’ but I was babbling, and we both knew it.

‘It is an ill omen.’

‘Yes.’

The Countess ordered that all the pieces be collected together, and declared that she would have a monument made to them in marble at the church of San Mercuriale. But that winter the rains fell
and the floods came, and though bread was sent out from the Rocca, there were many who starved in Forli, and many more who blamed not the comet but the Countess for defying its warning.

My dreams returned, haunting me as I worked in the
farmacia
or combed out the Countess’s hair or tried to lose myself in my studies. I thought again of my mother and the charm she
had worked into my old red dress – she’d had the sight, and knew what it meant. And sometimes I saw myself, standing in the window above the Zocodover, the light streaming out behind me
and my hands gleaming red, and I thought of what I was, and how I was cursed. I thought perhaps I should run away, that it was me who would bring bad luck to the Countess, but I pushed it from my
mind. I was happy here, and besides, I knew now that however far I ran, the shadow of the man in black would find me.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
HAD PROMISED MY LADY TO CAST A CHART FOR HER
wedding, and I dearly hoped that she would take Ser Giovanni as her third
husband. He was a Medici gentleman born, and surely the people of Forli would love him for his handsomeness and his fine manners and his Florentine gold as much as they had hated the others, men
who they had taken from her with murder. When she had me take the maids to the gardens to gather white and yellow jasmine and heavy-scented tuberoses to garland the pavilion, I was glad, for I
thought that they would be betrothed and that her city would celebrate with her. I thought that with a strong young husband at her side, her lands and her family would be safe. Yet there was no
proclamation of the wedding, no exchange of letters and gifts and no great people arriving to feast at the Rocca. There was only the Countess in her nightgown before dawn on a late summer’s
morning, bidding me rise and help her to dress; a walk across the silvered parkland, our feet making deep prints in the dew; Ser Giovanni waiting in the summerhouse with a monk fetched from the
convent; and a ring that passed from his hand to hers and then to mine, for I was her witness and I was to keep her secret safe.

There was talk, of course, that the Countess was secretly married, but I kept my countenance and held my tongue, letting out her bodices and lacing her less tightly, but it would not be long
before her belly showed the world what she still denied. Her uncle, the Duke of Milan, would be sorely angered, she told me, if he learned that she had married without his permission. Forli was too
isolated, too weak without the protection of the Sforza. When Il Moro sent an envoy from Bologna to sniff out the rumour of the marriage, my lady put on her widow’s weeds, draping herself in
heavy black, and Ser Giovanni kept his own room. The rumours of love between them were lies, said my lady sweetly; her Medici guest had prolonged his visit to see about the harvest for which
Florence hungered, and to avoid the trouble which had befallen his family there. There would be no new marriage, she claimed, that her uncle did not choose for her. The sala at the Rocca glittered
with all her treasure of plate and she murmured as she served the envoy’s wine with her own hands in a gem-encrusted cup that she was a poor widow, who counted on the goodness of the Duke to
protect her. Ser Giovanni made it plain that he was no lover of the French, and sent his loyal respects to Milan. My lady, meanwhile, wrote a pious letter to Savonarola in Florence, expressing her
wish that he would assist her to come closer to God. The Florentines bought another huge consignment of grain and ten lions were ordered for the hunting park of the Paradiso; the envoy departed no
wiser and I thought the Countess must be very clever, to get what she would have from all, and commit herself to nothing.