David (11 page)

‘I am having a bolt installed on the inside of Leone’s studio door,’ he said. ‘Everyone who comes when you are there – including me – must knock and wait for admittance while you make yourself, er, comfortable.’

He did seem genuinely sorry and yet I was the one who had broken our agreement and run away.

‘It is I who must apologise, my lord,’ I said. ‘I should not have left with my work undone. I was merely startled.’

‘Understandably, and I promise it will not happen again. Please say you will come back. Leone is fearful that his Hercules will not be finished.’

What could I say? Visdomini insisted on my taking the money, even though I hadn’t earned it, and as soon as I had finished work, I went and bought a little cameo ring for Rosalia, which used all he had given me. Later that week, I entrusted it to a carter in a little packet addressed to my sweetheart. And before Our Lord’s birthday, I was rewarded with a letter written by a scribe in Settignano, in which she thanked me so artlessly and with such joy at having a memento from me, that I forgot my new patron’s eyes assessing the body of his Hercules.

He had been as good as his word and from then on, Grazia would knock at the door when she brought my payment and supper, and Leone would make her wait while I hurriedly dressed myself. He and I fell into the habit of eating our supper together. Sometimes Grazia stayed and drank with us; sometimes if she had urgent duties to attend to she left the two of us together.

Leone was painting now and his Hercules was emerging out of a greenish-brown background, his muscles glowing bronze, like the tawny lion’s skin.

The evenings that I was not posing, I was with the
frateschi
up near San Marco. I told them that I was now practically a member of the household of a prominent pro-Medicean and they didn’t again suggest that I should infiltrate de’ Altobiondi’s circle.

But after the night of my embarrassment, when I knew there had been conspirators at Visdomini’s house, I hadn’t heard any more about them. I was beginning to feel that although I was in one way an insider, in another I was further from finding out what was going on in his
salone
than if I spent my evenings in the street watching the comings and goings at his front door.

My chance to find out more didn’t come until the year had turned and then I am afraid it was baser instincts that led to my greater knowledge.

One evening, when I had been posing less than half an hour, there came an urgent knocking at the studio door.

‘Curses!’ said Leone. ‘Who is this interrupting my work now?’

I scrambled into my clothes.

It was much too early for our supper but it was Grazia, with an urgent message from her master.

‘He wants to bring his friends in to see the painting,’ she explained. ‘They are on their way down.’

Leone grumbled a bit; like most painters he didn’t want people to see his work before it was finished but what could he do about it? His patron housed, fed and clothed him and paid for all his materials and would buy the painting from him at the end. That left Leone no rights in the matter. And I had the strongest feeling that Visdomini had commissioned his Hercules because he wanted me to be the subject, rather than having searched for an appropriate human model for an idea he or Leone wished to see completed.

Chief among the friends who came crowding into the studio was de’ Altobiondi. For the first time, he registered my existence.

‘Your painter has caught the likeness well,’ he told Visdomini, looking at me and the canvas by turns. ‘But where did you find such a Hercules in our inferior times?’

‘In the Via del Proconsolo,’ said my patron, laughing. ‘See, he has the muscles to kill a lion with his bare hands. Show him, Gabriele.’

He made me roll up my sleeves and make fists to show off my arm muscles. I burned with the humiliation but put all my anger into clenching my fists with a realism that came from the desire to smash them into Altobiondi’s face.

‘A magnificent specimen,’ said Altobiondi, just as if his friend had shown him a new hunting dog or hawk.

‘Your wife certainly thought so’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I had no desire to be run through by the blade Altobiondi carried openly on his belt, so I kept quiet.

They didn’t stay long. Visdomini had been keen to show off his pet painter, the handsomely equipped studio and his tame Hercules, but once his friends had shown they were sufficiently impressed, they were keen to get back to whatever business they had upstairs.

‘Nobles!’ said Leone, hefting the coins the departing visitors had pressed on him.

I had come in for my share of largesse as well and it was all going to go into my stock under the mattress – my wedding fund, as I was beginning to think of it.

But we both gave a bit to Grazia, who was surprised and thankful.

‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘I do only what I get paid for.’

‘So do we,’ said Leone, and I saw for the first time that he was as much a servant as was the waiting-girl or the artist’s model. ‘They make me sick, with their fancy clothes and their airs and graces and their belief that God put them on the earth to get others to do their will.’

These were revolutionary thoughts. I looked round to check that none of Visdomini’s friends had lingered behind to ogle the pretty servant – or me – but we were safe.

‘Are you against the noble families then?’ I asked in a low voice.

‘I don’t know why any working man would think differently,’ he said, looking at me disapprovingly. ‘Even though I am dependent on their patronage.’

‘I feel the same,’ I said, the coin that Altobiondi had almost thrown at me burning in my palm. ‘I am a republican.’

‘But your friends in San Procolo are Medici men,’ said Leone.

We seemed to have stopped work and Grazia was listening to us intently.

‘The sculptor had a patron too,’ I said. ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici. And he had good cause to be grateful to him. But he became a supporter of Savonarola and so did at least two of his brothers. Indeed the oldest one is still a friar at San Marco.’

The name had been said. Leone looked round as if the walls might have ears.

‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you a
piagnone
?’

I nodded. The painter came and clasped my hand.

‘We will not talk more of it here,’ he said. ‘But it gladdens my heart to know that you and I are on the same side.’

He glanced at Grazia. ‘You will keep our secret?’ he asked her. ‘Working people should stick together.’

‘Then you should know what’s going on upstairs,’ she said. ‘I hear things as I bring them their wine. Which I must go and do now. The master won’t like me to linger down here with you two when rich men might need food or drink.’

‘What is going on upstairs?’ I asked. ‘What have you heard?’

‘They want the de’ Medici back,’ she said.

‘Everyone knows that,’ said Leone. ‘They think the return of the family means the return of wealth to their pockets.’

‘But what are they doing about it?’ I asked. This was my chance to find out the details of the plot.

A bell rang in the distance and Grazia jumped up, flustered.

‘I must go,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow I have a half-day free in honour of Saint Remigius. Meet me at the Baptistery at midday and I’ll tell you what I know.’

And then she was gone. Leone looked at me with a half-smile.

‘I notice she didn’t offer to tell me,’ he said, as he bolted the door again. ‘Come on, get your clothes off. Neither of us is being paid to chat.’

I was outside the Baptistery as the bell in the campanile tolled the midday hour. And yet I almost missed Grazia. She had changed into her best dress, a mossy green velvet one that I somehow knew had once belonged to her mistress. It was only half covered by her russet cloak, so I knew she wanted to show it off. And in her hair she had twined a crimson ribbon. She wore no jewels – I doubt she possessed any – but she looked as charming as any lady could on this cold January day.

There were few places in the city where a young man might take a young woman to be warm in winter – especially on a saint’s day. But I knew of a bakery nearby, where the ovens would be fired up even on a holiday and the baker had befriended me some months before, for the sake of my closeness to the Buonarroti family. He had a very beautiful wife of good birth and was always talking about having her portrait painted. I think he liked to be on friendly terms with artists.

So I took Grazia to Gandini the baker’s and bought us hot soft rolls to eat as we sat in a corner of his
paneficio
. It wasn’t really open to the public but a few of the baker’s regulars were there and his wife gave us cups of hot spiced wine in honour of Saint Remigius, she said.

Grazia and I were sitting cosily in a corner and I realised that we looked like any other couple of the common people, enjoying some rare time away from work.
I must tell her about Rosalia
, I thought.

But she started to talk in a low and urgent voice about the conspirators at Visdomini’s house. It was clear that she didn’t think of our meeting as any kind of tryst.

‘They are supporting more than one member of the de’ Medici family,’ she said. ‘Piero, as before, but I think they have no high hopes of him after last time. So now they are talking about Giovanni – the one who is a cardinal in Rome. And another one . . . Giuliano? No, Giulio. He is the bastard son of Lorenzo’s brother.’

That made me jump a bit and I thought of Clarice for the first time for weeks. It seemed as if nobles could father children outside marriage and their offspring still find a superior place in society. But not men like me.

Still, this was a useful titbit to take back to the
frateschi
.

‘Do you know anything about when they are expecting to bring the de’ Medici back into the city?’ I asked. It was very intimate, sitting so close together that our faces were almost touching, keeping warm in the bakery while the streets outside were rimed with frost.

‘No,’ said Grazia. ‘I hear only snippets. It has taken weeks to understand as much as I have told you.’

‘It’s very helpful to me,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to get you into any trouble.’

‘Why does it help you?’ she asked. ‘How does it?’

‘You know I am not sympathetic to the Medici cause,’ I said quietly. ‘There are . . . friends of mine who want to know this sort of information.’

‘And what would they do, these “friends” of yours?’

I didn’t know the answer to that.

‘Will you tell me anything else you find out?’ I asked, taking her hand.

It was a rough hand, not like Clarice’s, but rough with work like Rosalia’s. I respected them both for that. She blushed but did not take her hand away.

‘There is no need for you always to go straight home after you have finished posing for Leone of an evening, I suppose?’ she said.

It was true that it was always Grazia who guided me to the front door when I had finished my supper. She carried a lantern, saw me out through the postern door and then locked it behind me. It was probably her last duty of the night.

‘I can tell you what I have learned in the previous few days if you come to my room before you leave,’ she said. ‘I have a room to myself.’

That meant she was a favoured and superior servant. But the thought of being alone with her in her bedchamber put me in a new kind of danger. I needed her information to help my chosen companions, but the price I would certainly have to pay for it, though sweet, would cost me dear.