Signora Da Vinci (29 page)

“In the eyes of the laws of this republic, you are betrothed.”

The citizens of Florence cheered. I felt Leonardo slip away from me, but I was determined not to lose him in the crush. I followed him to the edge of the piazza, where the onlookers had thinned, and rushed after his hurrying form. Tall as he was, his shoulders were hunched and his head hung between them as a mule that has just been whipped.

I came to his side and slipped my arm into the crook of his elbow. “We’re going home,” I said.

He didn’t speak and he didn’t resist. He just came along, as though purged of all will. I unlocked the apothecary door, and he went in ahead of me, climbing the stairs two at a time to the second floor. When I reached him he was sitting on a bench near the window and staring down at the street, though I doubt he was seeing anything but a dark chasm of despair.

“My darling boy . . .”

“Because he did not see fit to marry you . . .”

“In his defense, Leonardo, your father
did
wish to marry me. No matter what happened after, you were conceived in love and passion. Piero simply did not have a spine stiff enough to fight for me. For us.”

“Like a snake,” Leonardo said with the greatest bitterness. He closed his eyes. “I wanted to kill him today. Squeeze the life out of him.”

“You have every reason to hate him,” I said. “But remember this. ‘He who takes the snake by the tail is afterward bitten by it.’ Your father has left us behind. He has no use for us. And he is bound for glory. I think it wise to stay out of his path. If you block his way or anger him I fear he will strike out at you. He still has the power to hurt you more than by simply ignoring your existence.”

He was looking at me with a sudden curious intensity. “How has it been for you, Mama, all this time? You, the most female, the most maternal of women, living as a man?”

I realized I’d scarcely allowed myself to dwell on the subject. I decided I would not think too deeply before answering.

“In almost all regards it has been miraculous,” I replied. “The most astonishing years of freedom.”

“But the fear of being discovered?” Leonardo pressed, incredulous at my nonchalance.

“Fading. I think that I am a better actor than I ever dreamed. And sometimes . . .” I fell quiet then, boggled at the next words I would speak. “I even feel myself a man.”

My son, who was so hard to surprise, was shocked into silence. His expression of bafflement was priceless. But I had said all I wished to for the moment.

“Shall we have our
sfogliatella
?” I suggested.

Leonardo removed the handkerchief from his pocket and laid the pastries on the table. “I’ll get us some wine,” I told him and went upstairs to the kitchen. When I returned a few minutes later I saw that he had laid the sweets aside and had covered the table with drawings. As I came closer, curious to see, he put out a hand to stay me.

“These are . . . different, Mama. I don’t want you to be worried.”

“Worried? What could worry me?”

He stepped aside. I stood over the table and looked down. It took a moment for my mind to comprehend what my eyes were seeing, but when it did my hand flew to cover my mouth.

Leonardo had taken a leap forward in his anatomical drawings. A very great leap. These were not the innards of small animals with their organs exposed. In metal point on blue paper, these were finely rendered drawings of human beings, or parts of human beings. Full dissections. Here a skull with every bit of flesh removed down to the bone. Here was a skinless human leg, fully realized with striations, and attachments and a sense that at any moment they might
move
.

But the renderings were only a part of each page’s makeup. Where the anatomical drawings left off, Leonardo’s backward scrawl began. Though I could not easily read the words, I knew without being told that they must be his explanations of what he had observed and drawn.

“Leonardo . . .”

“You don’t have to tell me, Mama. I know it is dangerous.”

“But do you know
how
dangerous? Pope Sixtus has hired on a torturer called Torquemada to carry out persecutions on all manner of sinners and heretics. This inquisition is already beginning in Spain with the Jews, many of whom are fleeing. Lorenzo plans to open Florence’s gates to them, but that will make this city and the people in it even more suspect in Rome’s eyes.” I knew I must sound desperate. “You must take care, Leonardo. Please!”

He fixed me with a mild, indulgent smile. “I cannot let slide so valuable an experience as the corpses. To see the human body like this”—he swept a graceful arm over the drawings on my table—“is a priceless gift from Nature. I am seeing the very causes of life, Mama! I have seen into the
brain
. I have followed the path of a nerve that stretches from behind the eyeball to the back of the skull!”

He touched me with a gentle finger on the back of my head. His gaze softened. “I have never been more alive . . . than when I am closely examining the dead. That sounds horrible . . .”

“No, not horrible. Odd, yes. Outrageous, yes. But wondrous.” I looked down at his anatomical drawings. “These are wondrous!”

He smiled at me. Then he took me by the shoulders and planted a kiss in the center of my forehead. “I will be careful. Take every precaution. I will
double
my precautions. Triple them!”

“You tease me now.”

He became very serious then and made me look into his eyes. “No, not teasing. Not in the least. I know what you sacrificed for me to be here, now, in Florence, in the company of the greatest men in the world! I will not endanger myself. I will not endanger you. I promise. Mama . . .” He hesitated with a strange look on his face. “What is between you and Lorenzo?”

“What is between us,” I began, “is very complicated.”

“Complicated?”

I threw my head back and gazed at the ceiling. Leonardo was the only person in the world with whom I could be my true self—who knew me as a woman, a man, a mother, an uncle, a patron, a friend.

“Lorenzo is in love with me,” I said. “With Cato.”

Now it was Leonardo’s hand that flew to his mouth.

“You’re not laughing at me, are you?”

“No, not laughing. Covering my flabbergasted expression.” He tilted his head in a way he did when observing the subject of a drawing. “Are you in love with him?”

“Oh, Leonardo, how could I not be?”

“Does he know?”

I shook my head.

My son heaved a great sigh. He understood all at once the implications, the complications, the impossibilities, the pain and the ridiculousness of our plight.

“I take it this is one ‘regard’ that has proven less than ‘miraculous.’”

I felt hot tears suddenly welling. Leonardo saw and placed his hand on mine.

“Surely you can confide in Lorenzo. He is a great man.”

“That is why I
cannot
confide. You and I are already in terrible danger should my disguise fail. Lorenzo carries the burden of all Tuscany on his shoulders. Should a friend of his be revealed as a . . . a . . .” I looked helplessly at my son. “What
am
I?”

“A hermaphrodite,” he said, pleased with his answer.

“Yes,” I agreed. “That will do for now.”

Both of us smiled. It was as though a weight, like a heavy woolen cloak, had been lifted from my shoulders. I had shared my secret—unique and delightful and unbearable as it was—with my beloved child.

“So have you any more?” I asked of the drawings.

“More?” He picked up his satchel and grinned wickedly. “Oh, Mama, you haven’t seen the least of them.”

CHAPTER 20

“Cato,comequickly!”

It was nearly evening when a wild-eyed Benito bolted in through the front door of my shop, setting the bell to frantic ringing. I looked up from my grinding mortar.

“It’s Leonardo. He’s been arrested!” Benito’s expression became even more panicked. “He’s being held by the Office of Night.”

My arms fell to my sides. I tried to compose myself. This was an office of the church—the “Conservers of Morality.” Leonardo’s arrest by these people could mean only one thing.

Benito wished to accompany me but I begged him to stay behind, close up my shop and tell no one what he knew. It was a futile request, I realized. News of this kind traveled quickly through the city.

I made my way through the city with the greatest haste, hardly letting myself think, for the thoughts were too dark, too beastly to contemplate.

When I arrived at the building a crowd had already gathered outside. I pushed my way in and saw before an official desk manned by two robed friars—one severe and lugubrious, the other puff-cheeked and florid—four groups of men talking with terrible intensity within themselves. These must, I realized, be the families of the others arrested with Leonardo.

I was shocked when one of them looked up from his conversation and revealed himself to be Lorenzo. He came to me at once, his concern impossible to conceal. It was a struggle almost beyond measure to maintain my male demeanor. I was Leonardo’s
mother
. He was in desperate circumstances, and I had never, since coming to Florence as a man, felt my femininity so strongly as I did in this moment. Yet I steeled myself and spoke as Cato.

“Is it sodomy?”

“It is.”

“Why are you here?”

“My cousin Lindo Tornabuoni is one of the others charged. And another is my uncle Bernardo Rucellai’s illegitimate son.”

I knew the name Rucellai. Everyone did. Theirs was a very great family in Florence, rivaling though not equaling the wealth of the Medici.

All I could do was shake my head in confusion.

“Three others are involved as well—two goldsmith’s apprentices and a doublet maker. The youth they’re said to have abused is another goldsmith from a good family.”

“Those speaking for the accused step forward,” the lugubrious friar intoned.

Everyone crowded around the desk. Beads of perspiration trailed down the cheeks of the fat-faced priest as he read from a document in his hands.

“Bartolomo di Pasquino, Arturo Baccino, Lindo Tornabuoni, Tommaso di Masini, and Leonardo da Vinci are charged with the lewd and degenerate vice of practicing sodomy on one Jacopo Saltarelli, not yet seventeen. They have been denounced anonymously by a virtuous citizen. . . .”

“Anonymously?!” one of the relatives cried with great indignation. “Then how do you know he or she is virtuous?”

“Silence,” the fat priest ordered with icy disdain, then continued as if he had never been interrupted. “By means of a letter dropped in a
tambura
drum—‘the mouth of truth’ in the Via Motola.” The
tamburas
were drum-shaped boxes placed around the city into which citizens deposited written accusations of their neighbors of both municipal and religious infractions.

I could feel the family members bristling around me. Only Lorenzo stood calm and strong at my side.

The other priest now spoke. “A hearing will take place tomorrow at noon. You will return then to see—”

“We will see them now,” Lorenzo said with unflinching simplicity. He stepped forward to face the friars, who had apparently not, till then, seen who stood among the relations of the accused.

The two clergymen leaned in to confer with one another. The pale, long-faced one tried with little success to not tremble. “The guard will take you to them.”

“Hold steady, Cato,” Lorenzo said as we were led through a wooden door past several official-looking offices and in through a second door, this one massive and made as much from iron as wood, and bolted shut from the outside.

The Office of Night prison hallway was dim and frightening. There were dismal barred cages on either side of us, peopled in the front cells by women who must have been prostitutes. Farther back we found six young men, two to a cage.

Leonardo was sitting with another young man, dressed all in black, behind bars, sharing a rude bench. The guard unlocked the door and Lorenzo and I were allowed in.

The black-frocked man, Tommaso di Masini, stood and embraced Lorenzo, muttering, “Thank goodness.” Leonardo barely looked up. I saw with alarm that for the first time in his life he had the appearance of a beaten dog.

“Nephew,” I said. When he did not rise I took Tommaso’s place on the bench he’d given up. “Leonardo.” I spoke his name softly, as I would to a person seriously ailing. “Are you injured. Ill?”

“No,” he said in a haunted tone, then glanced around. “But I am here in this terrible place. . . .”

Thankfully, Lorenzo spoke up. “You will not be for long, Leonardo. None of you will.”

Hope gleamed in his eyes. “Can we go with you now?”

I marveled at Lorenzo’s calm as he said, “Not till tomorrow, after the hearing. At noon. Then you’ll be freed. I promise you.”

Leonardo shook his head. “I cannot stay here the night.” Panic was rising in him. He looked at Lorenzo pleadingly. “We’re in a
cage
.”

“I know. But you’re not alone. Your friend is with you. And you’ll be strong for one another.” He held Tommaso’s eyes now. “Will you not?”

Tommaso nodded.

Leonardo was crumbling inside.

My heart broke for him. I took him into a manly embrace, stifling the truest of my own fearful emotions.

“Trust Lorenzo,” I whispered.

Now the jailor was at the door. We took our leave. Lorenzo had a quick word with his other cousin in a separate cell, and when he came out we left the place.

We walked in silence for a while, my mind in a whirl of fear and despair equaled, I was sure, only by Leonardo’s own. Lorenzo was maddeningly calm.

“I’m very suspicious,” he finally said. “Of the four boys arrested, two of them are related by marriage to the Medici. I’d wager the motive here is political. The others arrested, like Leonardo, were unwitting casualties.” Then he noticed my condition. “Cato, you’re trembling.”