Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (8 page)

He was occupied at the furnace in the back and did not see me at first, giving me the opportunity to study him as he worked the massive
blowpipe he held as easily as though it were a feather. The sculpted muscles of his bare back flexed as he filled a molten lump of sand with breath, transforming it into a shimmering glass bubble streaked with crimson and azure.

According to Pliny the Elder, the Phoenicians discovered the art of making glass, although some say it was known even earlier. The Moors in Andalusia refined the technique, producing works of astounding purity. But it fell to the Venetians to create glass of such breathtaking beauty as to be likened to the exhalations of angels. Rocco was a true master of the art and it was for that reason, and surely for no other, that I found him so fascinating to watch.

I held back, not wanting to startle him, until he clipped off the finished goblet and set it on a nearby rack to cool. Only then did I muster a smile and step forward.

For just a moment, as he caught sight of me, his expression was unguarded. I saw there—what exactly? Surprise, of course, for he could not have expected to see me again so soon, but something more. A flash of wary pleasure, perhaps, or was that merely a trick of the speckled sunlight filtering through the plane trees shading the yard? Surely there was nothing to merit the sudden flush of warmth that stained my cheeks and made me look away.

“I need your advice,” I said simply and was relieved when he put down his tools and nodded.

We sat again at the table near the back door, well away from the busy street. Nando was out playing with friends. For the moment, we were alone. Briefly, I described what had happened in the past day. I said nothing of the attack on me but saw him frowning at the bruise on my forehead, revealed when I absently brushed my hair aside.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. I am fine.” Uneasy beneath his penetrating gaze, I moved quickly to the reason for my visit.

“Do you know what my father was working on at the time of his death?”

“I do not,” Rocco said. “Why do you ask?”

“Questions have come up,” I said carefully. “I am endeavoring to find answers.”

“For Borgia? Is he the one asking questions?”

“Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? It’s not as though I would run about asking at anyone else’s behest.”

That was tarter than I had intended, but Rocco did not seem to mind. He leaned back, studying me, and said, “I made equipment for your father a few months ago, but it was of the same sort you just ordered and could be used for any number of purposes.”

“He said nothing to you of why he wanted it?”

The glassmaker hesitated a moment before replying, “Giovanni was always very discreet. He rarely spoke of his work in any but the most general terms.”

“Were there never circumstances when he felt able to speak in greater detail? Perhaps in a gathering of like-minded friends?”

If I hoped that Rocco would respond to my clumsy attempt to bring up Lux, I was disappointed. He merely shrugged and said, “I would help you if I could, Francesca, but I truly do not know what your father was doing. If Borgia also does not, perhaps Giovanni had reason to keep it to himself.”

“I am not so certain that His Eminence doesn’t know,” I confessed for, having failed yet again, I had little left to lose. “He may or may not. I think his interest runs more to whether my father left records of his work.”

Briefly, I told him of the mission I had been sent on. When I was done, I asked, “Have you ever been in the ghetto?”

“Occasionally. I have customers there, or at least I did before all the trouble started.”

“You mean the refugees?”

Rocco nodded. “I hear it’s a real mess there now.”

“And likely to get worse. In little more than a month, any Jew left in Spain will be subject to immediate execution.”

“They’re mad, those Spaniards.”

“Maybe so, but it’s not as though the Jews are welcome here. Conditions in the ghetto are terrible.”

Something in my voice must have revealed my distress at what I had seen, for Rocco got up, went to the cabinet, and poured wine for us both. Returning to the table, he set a goblet in front of me. “Drink that before you say anything more.”

Grateful, I did as he said. The wine hit my empty stomach hard, but it also gave me a small sense of distance from the reality I had witnessed.

“Did you know that my father went there?”

“To the ghetto?”

“He knew a woman there, an apothecary.”

“How do you know this?”

I told him about Sofia Montefiore. When I was done, Rocco shook his head slowly. “She says it was winter when she last saw your father, but the Cardinal believes he was there much more recently?”

I nodded. “I have to assume that is the case since Borgia sent me to see her at the same time he said he wanted any records of recent work that my father might have left.”

“Do you think she is telling the truth?”

That was the crux of it. Sofia Montefiore had showed no surprise at my sudden appearance. It was almost as though she had been expecting me.

Slowly, I said, “No, I don’t.”

Rocco sighed and sat back in his chair. He twirled the stem of his goblet between his large fingers scarred by so many years of work with fire and glass. His eyes met mine.

“The Jews have a rough time of it. She won’t tell you anything unless you can convince her to trust you.”

I finished the last of my wine and pushed my glass toward him. As he refilled it, I said, “And to do that—” The images of what I had seen flowed through my mind—the suffering, the horror, the grinding hopelessness of the ghetto from which there seemed to be no escape except death itself.

“To do that,” I said, “I have to go back.”

Steeled in my resolve to discover whatever Sofia Montefiore knew, I returned to the ghetto the next day. Vittoro came with me—for protection but also to carry the medicines I brought. I would like to tell you that I intended them as an act of charity in obedience to the injunction that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, but the truth is I brought them in order to bribe the apothecary.

Perhaps bribe is too harsh a word. Call them an inducement to convince her to tell me what I needed to know, and in so doing spare us both a great deal of trouble. But before I could approach her, I had to run the gauntlet of suffering that was the ghetto and find again its Via di Miseria where her shop was located.

Although we looked around for Benjamin as soon as we passed through the gate, we saw no sign of him. I had a flicker of concern that he was picking pockets in the city beyond and risking dire
punishment in the process, but before we had gotten very far, he popped out from behind a pile of garbage with a nonchalant grin on his face.

“Everyone’s talking about you,” he said.

Vittoro merely grunted but I have a tendency to chatter when I am anxious. “What are they saying?”

Benjamin took a deep breath, significantly expanding his scrawny chest, and launched into his recitation. “Some think you are a witch, signorina. Others say it is too soon to tell. Some say you are a spy for the Cardinal, and no one really disagrees with that, but there is argument over why so illustrious a personage would feel the need to spy on us. As for you, signore—” He indicated Vittoro. “Some say you are a military man, others believe you are the signorina’s familiar.”

That got the captain’s attention, but he merely grunted again and kept going. We came at last to the apothecary shop. If anything, the line in front was longer than it had been the previous day. There were also several shrouded bodies lying near the street, waiting for whoever disposed of corpses in the ghetto. In the city beyond, the dead are buried in the churchyards. Except in times of plague, even paupers go to a decent grave. But dead Jews . . . I had no idea what happened to them.

“We should not tarry,” Vittoro said as Benjamin opened the door and we stepped inside.

This time, I did not bother to cover my face. While many believe that disease is caused by bad air, I am not convinced, although I gladly would have protected myself from the stench had not hiding behind a scented pomander seemed a poor approach to winning Sofia Montefiore’s trust.

As it was, she was in no position to give me her attention. A young woman in the throes of childbirth lay in a corner of the room
crowded with the sick and dying. She was on her back on a thin pallet, her face the pasty gray of approaching death, seemingly slumped in insensibility. Sofia Montefiore knelt between her spread legs. The young man at her side, clutching her hand, was weeping.

“Push,” Sofia urged. “For love of your child, you must push!”

I heard her but I could not tell if the young woman did. The pool of blood seeping out from beneath her suggested she was already beyond such cares.

I stumbled back toward the door and bumped instead into Vittoro. He set down the medicine chest quickly and grabbed hold of me.

“Donna, are you all right?”

For pity’s sake, I was the poisoner of no less than Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, one of the most feared men in all of Christendom. I had, only three days before, killed a man to attain that position. I had survived a beating and sworn to avenge my father. I was not and never had been weak.

But I was terrified. Having lived only with my father—without mother, aunts, sisters, cousins—I was not inured to the reality of childbirth as every young woman is expected to be. On the contrary, I saw the suffering that had killed my own mother as bizarre and hideous.

I did not answer Vittoro but did manage to recover myself enough to stand on my own. The young man was bent over sobbing. Sofia said something more that I did not hear; it may have been a curse. When he did not respond, she reached around behind her, took hold of a knife she must have hidden there and—

The young woman screamed. The sound went on and on, seeming to echo off the walls pressing in so close around and set the very air to vibrating. A scream of such anguish that devils in the pits of
Hell must have heard it. It took her life’s breath and left her slumped, eyes wide and unseeing, in the young man’s arms.

Another cry was heard, far more feeble, the whimper of a new life born out of death. I saw the baby stained with his mother’s blood, saw the bloodstained knife Sofia dropped, saw her face, and then I saw nothing but the floor.

Such humiliation! For a long time afterward, I insisted to myself that I had not fainted at the mere sight of blood. I had merely sat down abruptly, forgetting there was no chair. Vittoro, bless him, never spoke of it. I had the comfort of my lies even as I knew the truth.

By the time I regained myself, the young woman’s eyes had been closed and her body decently covered, her distraught husband was being led away; the exhausted Sofia had handed the baby, wrapped in a length of grimy blanket, to a pale young woman who wearily offered him her shriveled breast.

Do not ask if the child lived; I have no idea. But in keeping with my new policy of honesty, let us admit that his chances were slim.

Half an hour later, I sat at the table in the back room across from Sofia Montefiore and told her that she could take the help I offered or she could face the wrath of the Cardinal, the choice was hers. I was not certain at first that she understood me, so withdrawn was she from the world into the place we go when life becomes too much. It was a place I knew well, having inhabited it myself after my father’s death and been tempted back toward it after I was beaten. In kindness, I might have let her stay there a little while, but kindness was not in me then.

“You must decide,” I insisted. “I can help you with medicines and with food, but in return, you must tell me everything my father said and give me anything he left with you.”

Sofia looked up, her eyes sunken and her lips ashen. So softly that I had to bend closer to hear her, she said, “I told you, he left nothing.”

That much, at least, I knew might be true. My father had ever been a careful man, and besides, such was my vanity that I did not want to believe he could have trusted anyone more than me.

However, I was also certain she was not telling me everything.

“This,” I said, indicating the medicine chest, “is only a small sample of what you can have. I will bring you—”

“I will tell you what you will bring,” Sofia said. Her voice remained very low yet her strength was unmistakable. “Most of what is called medicine is useless. I will give you a list of what I require.”

When I nodded, she said, “Once you have what you want, why should I believe that you will keep your part of the bargain?”

“I will give you my word—”

Her laugh was hoarse and strained, as though it did not get much use. “Your word? The only Christian I ever knew who cared about keeping his word to a Jew was your father, and I do not see him here.”

That stung. While it is true that I do not resemble my father—he was darker than I am and of stouter build—I like to think that I have his nature. That stands to reason as he raised me.

“He may not be here,” I said coldly, “but I would never betray his memory.”

Sofia thought about that for several moments, long enough for me to begin to believe that she would reject my assurances. Finally she nodded.

“We must speak alone,” she said, and looked at Vittoro. “Entirely alone.”

“I will be right outside,” he told me. With a warning glare at her, he left, taking Benjamin with him.

Silence hovered in the small room where the scent of herbs hanging from the rafters fought a futile battle against the stench of sickness and death. I heard the creaking of a cart in the lane beyond and a muted shout from far away.

Finally, Sofia said, “I last saw your father in March, right before the festival of Purim. Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head. Apart from the charge that they had killed Christ, I knew nothing of the Jews.

“It is when we celebrate our salvation from the one called Haman, who served the mighty emperor of Persia and who sought the annihilation of the Jewish people.”

Despite myself, I was curious. That, too, is a part of my father in me. “Why did he do that?”