Signora Da Vinci (32 page)

I wished desperately to help him but I found myself pushed back by the panicked masses surging for the cathedral’s doors. I glimpsed Francesco Pazzi racing to intercept Lorenzo, who now leapt like a young stag over a painted screen at the choir, heading toward the new sacristy behind the altar. His friends took on the assassins in a frenzied battle that ended, suddenly—the moment they saw Lorenzo safe at the sacristy gate. They ran to join him, leaving several attackers down, and Francesco Pazzi standing blood-soaked and utterly damned in the center of the cathedral floor.

I watched with a soaring heart as Lorenzo and company slammed the gate with a resounding crash that echoed through the high cavernous arches of the Duomo. Then Pazzi was running past me like a wild thing, out the church doors, and I found myself alone.

All but for Giuliano, who lay inert in a pool of thickening gore.

I went slowly forward, knowing that there was nothing to be done for him. I knelt at his side and saw the skull split nearly in two halves, the blue doublet in tatters, the body beneath it like freshly butchered meat. When I tore my eyes away from the sight of him I saw a man hanging incongruously from the ladder of the organ loft.

It was Sandro Botticelli, staring down at the horror that had been wrought upon his beloved family. Even from that height he must have seen that Giuliano was beyond help. Our eyes met, but I had no voice at all. I just stretched my arms beseechingly, though for what I besought I did not know.

Then Botticelli was scrambling down the ladder and disappeared back into the sacristy.

I removed my cape, placing it over my fallen friend. Unarmed as I always was, I stood guard over his poor body should anyone dare come to further desecrate it.

A moment later I saw a pack of men rushing past the open cathedral door. I glimpsed Angelo Poliziano, bringing up the rear, swiveling fearfully to look behind him, before he, too, disappeared from sight.

And there I waited, hour after hour, seeking some sense in this senseless murder, weeping and whispering curses in the house of a vengeful god.

 

After standing guard over Giuliano’s body at the Duomo I had finally come away, leaving the sisters of San Gallo to tenderly remove him. I had arrived at the Palazzo Medici so dazed I hardly saw or felt the mob milling around me. When I came to my senses I saw they were men—from the oldest to the youngest—each of them armed and now surging toward their ruler’s home to defend it with their lives.

A rumbling had grown into a roar as Lorenzo stepped out onto his balcony, his red brocaded doublet stained even darker at the left shoulder, a blood-soaked bandage tied around his neck. As he raised his hand the cries grew louder and I heard myself with the others shouting his name as a chant—“Lorenzo! Lorenzo!”

There was no way to describe the agony that was painted across his features. His posture was upright and proud, but the soul inside that fragile shell must have been sagging and withered. He had lost his brother—“the better half,” he used to tell us. He could hardly quiet the crowd, but finally his words rose above their din.

“Citizens of Florence,” he began, his voice more strong and steady than I could have imagined it to be. “We have suffered a great loss today. My brother . . .”

Even from a distance I could see his expression crack and fold with the torment of exerting such excruciating control. The crowd was whining and snarling in anticipation of the next words spoken.

“. . . Giuliano is dead.”

The howls of rage and agony grew to a roar, and the seething mass began to move, outward and away from the Medici balcony.

“No, stay!” Lorenzo shouted from where he stood. “Good people, you must listen to me!” He waited till they quieted and stilled. “I implore you, for the love of God, moderate your actions!”

“The Pazzi are responsible for this!” someone in the crowd shouted back at him. “Will you tell us otherwise!?”

“I will not tell you that. But I can say that magistrates even now have some of the mur . . .” He stumbled at the foul word. “. . . murderers of my brother in their custody. The others are being sought as we speak. Justice will be done!”

“That’s right!” a young man cried out, thrusting his sword into the air. “And we’ll be the ones doing it!”

The sound of that affirmation was deafening.

“Take care!” Lorenzo’s voice was raw with anxiety. “In our frenzy we must not punish the innocent!”

“Giuliano was innocent!” an old man near me raged. “And now he’s in pieces on a cold marble slab!!”

“Please, please . . .”

But Lorenzo’s words were lost as the crowd began to disperse, though not into four directions. The bulk of them, swords and daggers and clubs raised high, were heading ominously south, in the direction of the Palazzo Pazzi.

Angelo Poliziano had come to the balcony then, and with a gentle hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder, drew him inside.

When the crowd had gone—except for a large self-appointed guard that surrounded the palazzo’s perimeter—I sought entrance inside to tend to my friend’s wounded neck. I knew there would be little I could do for his torn and bleeding spirit.

All was chaotic inside the palazzo, the ground floor thick with family, Medici supporters, Signoria members, and clergy. I climbed the broad stairs to the first floor to find the main salon door open, and went in.

It was a scene of the most ghastly despair. Male friends and relations, many of them shouting, some of them still weeping, stood in small clutches peering nervously out the windows to observe the streets. A larger contingent had gathered around Lorenzo and Lucrezia. I found it horribly ironic to see them all here beneath Pollaiuolo’s paintings of Hercules engaged in violence and killing, and wondered if, despite Lorenzo’s deeply felt instinct toward peace in his republic, brutality and mayhem were now its only fate.

It was hard looking at Lucrezia, knowing only as a mother could know that unutterable pain of losing so beloved a child, that the very heart of her had been wrenched from her breast. When finally I braved a look I saw the alarming pallor of her cheeks, red-rimmed eyes sunken into dark sockets, mouth a press-lipped slash across her jaw. She had aged immeasurably in a few hours.

Lorenzo, though he tightly clutched her hand, was speaking with great passion to the men who had become, suddenly, his
consiglieres
—Ficino, Landino, Poliziano, Bisticci.

I saw Sandro Botticelli standing, looking altogether helpless, behind them. The agony etched in his features was excruciating. I went and stood beside him.

“Tell me about Lorenzo’s wound,” was all I could think to say.

“The flesh is sliced clean. No deeper than that.” Botticelli’s eyes, always sparkling, were dull and dead. “Young Ridolphi insisted on sucking it out, fearing poison on the blade.” Sandro looked down at his feet. His voice was raw and ragged. “Oh, Cato . . . Lorenzo knew nothing of Giuliano’s murder until we brought him here. No one dared tell him in the cathedral. He thought . . . he thought Giuliano was still in his bed, safe from all harm. When Lorenzo was secured here he told me to bring him his brother.” Botticelli covered his face with both hands and choked into them. “It was
I
who told him Giuliano was dead!”

He began sobbing loudly, shoulders heaving. I put my arm around him and brought him into a corner, allowing him to weep like a small boy in his mother’s arms.

“Oh God!” he cried.

At this, Lorenzo looked up and for the first time I caught his eye. He held my gaze steadily as the others talked to him of strategy and revenge, till finally he was drawn away by the urgent voices of his counselors.

Finally I was given leave to tend the stitched dagger wound with my medicines. We spoke not at all, Lorenzo staring straight ahead with glazed eyes. Only heaven knew what horrors he was reliving . . . or imagining.

When I finished, my hand lingered on his neck perhaps a moment more than necessary. Before I could remove it he grasped my fingers and held them tight. In that strangely private moment we mourned Giuliano, and Lorenzo thanked me for my ministrations. But I knew I had failed to offer any real comfort, for there was none to be had.

With the others I stayed in the salon throughout that day and night. I offered both Lorenzo and his mother a potion of poppy and valerian to calm them. Lucrezia accepted it gratefully, but he refused it. He needed his wits about him, he told me, and every bit of the furious humors that were coursing through his veins. That way he could act against his enemies, as an arrow shot from a crossbow—powerfully and with a true deadly aim.

 

In the weeks and months after, when the full extent of the conspiracy became known, the mood of Florence changed forever. Certainly there had been family feuds that had torn the city apart, and many murders. But never had one beloved by so many died such a cruel and premature death.

The conspirators were found to be members and adherents of the widely respected Pazzi family. A Florentine archbishop named Salviati had been revealed as the grand conspirator. For weeks after Giuliano’s death, mobs swarmed and rioted in Florentine streets. Every other day one or another of the culprits was caught and taken to the Signoria, where their savage punishments were meted out to cheers and jeers, sometimes laughter. But many grown men sobbed as the wound of their young leader’s loss was ripped open again and again.

Worse, we learned that the Holy Father himself had taken part in the assassination plot. Florentines felt such an unfathomable rage at their spiritual master that some eighty men died for the killing of one.

But that was not the last betrayal. Sixtus, infuriated that his conspiracy had failed to bring our city under his control, had taken the diabolical step of condemning Lorenzo and the citizens for daring to hang the “ecclesiastical person” of Archbishop Salviati. Calling Florentines “dogs led to savage madness” he had, unbelievably, excommunicated them, one and all. He’d forbidden that mass be said. No baptisms or burials would be recognized. St. John the Baptist Day—the most sacred and beloved of all Florentine religious festivals—was to be canceled.

There seemed to be no end to the savagery of Rome.

 

For many months I saw little of Lorenzo, his limpid dream of Florence as “the New Athens” shattered with Giuliano’s death and Rome’s campaign to crush Tuscany’s will. The bullying pope insisted that Florence “atone for its sins,” and Lorenzo was ordered to appear in the Holy City.

All of these edicts were defied.

Don Ferrante of Naples proved an unfaithful ally, too willing to treat with Pope Sixtus against Florence, even sending his Neapolitan armies to join the Roman guard in open battle against Florentine troops.

Then, in a display of diplomatic bravado that stunned even his staunchest admirers, Lorenzo stole away from Florence on a moonless night and laid himself—body and soul—at the mercy of the tyrant in Naples. “This war was begun in the blood of my brother,” he had written to the Signoria before he left, “so it may be that by my blood it must be concluded.”

His friends were all sick with worry that the evil Don Ferrante would do him harm—imprison or even murder him.

But in the end Lorenzo came home to us—happy, healthy, riding a magnificent gift horse from Don Ferrante—an honorable peace treaty with Naples in hand. The whole population came out in a riot of gratitude to welcome their hero. He had saved them from war. The shouts and trumpet blasts were deafening. Strangers embraced each other in the streets.

It seemed as if all the affection heaped upon the two brothers now fell as an avalanche of love and pride on the one who still lived. From the moment he stepped through the western gate of Florence, my dear friend was ever after hailed as Lorenzo
Il Magnifico
. Even without a crown on his head all the world, it seemed, looked to him as a force to be reckoned with.

And I had never before been so much in love.

CHAPTER 23

It was very late, but I had been inundated with demands for the remedy for a lung fever sweeping our quarter. Though its symptoms were thankfully not plaguelike, still there was terror of the plague, and the first few customers that had used my concoction of feverfew and mallow had seen miraculous relief.

Several days earlier I’d gone to the herbal importers on Via Salvia and emptied their shelves of these dried flowers, then ground masses of them till my wrist hurt and my eyes were bleary. In my laboratory I’d distilled, then calcinated them into a fine powder. Now I was finally folding a few grams into paper envelopes and sealing them with wax. Tomorrow the apothecary would be mobbed with customers clamoring for the medicine.

It was tedious work, this part was, and my mind strayed as it often did to thoughts of Leonardo. It was hard not to worry about my son, for he’d recently left Verrocchio’s protective wing and struck out on his own. He had taken himself to live in the bottom two floors of a house on Via da Bardi with little space, and even less good light for painting. Upon beginning his tenancy he’d immediately run afoul of his landlord, when, without permission, he had unceremoniously knocked out the front wall of the ground floor for a window.

Then he’d brought to live and work for him Tommaso di Masini, the bastard son of Lucrezia’s brother. Now since the Saltarelli affair he was known as Zoroastre. He seemed a kindred spirit with Leonardo, clothing himself only in linen so he would not, as he said, “wear anything dead” on his body. Even after his public humiliation at the sodomy trial he had never abandoned his black attire and so was believed by many to be a magician of the Occult Arts. Leonardo had no money to pay the young man for grinding his colors and his excellent metalworking skills, but the young man seemed less interested in wages than friendship with another young eccentric man steeped in the dark side of Florence.