Signora Da Vinci (53 page)

CHAPTER 41

She sweet, sickening stench of roasting human flesh assaulted my nostrils, yet I could not bring myself to turn away from the sight atop a single platform in the center of the Piazza della Signoria—two burning figures, now unrecognizable save for bits of heavy brown cloth still clinging to their charred bodies. As I clutched Papa’s and Leonardo’s hands for strength, I prayed that the men had died a quick death by hanging before their incineration.

I could see some onlookers in the crowded square, “Mad Dogs” more than likely, who seemed to derive satisfaction from these deaths. But many more Florentines were watching with grim, fearful expressions.

Now from the Signoria came a flurry of motion. A handful of city fathers, somber in their long tunics, were followed out by two Signoria guards, dragging by the armpits a man in the coarse brown robe of a Dominican monk toward a second larger and yet-unlit pyre, piled thickly with pitch-covered logs and branches.

Though his black hair was matted with sweat and blood, and his face covered with purple bruised swellings no doubt inflicted during torture in the previous weeks, the man was clearly recognizable. While conscious, Savonarola appeared almost boneless, his arms hanging limp from the shoulders, the tops of his bare feet dragging across the stone piazza.

“Leonardo?” I heard whispered behind us by a familiar voice, but I hesitated turning.

Leonardo did. “Sandro?” he said quietly.

“Is that you?” Botticelli whispered back, incredulous.

“It is.”

They were keeping their voices very low. Leonardo grasped Papa’s and my elbows and turned us. “This is my mother, Caterina—Cato’s sister—and my grandfather, Ernesto. They’ve moved from Vinci. They’re living here now.”

“As I understand it,” Botticelli said to Papa, “Cato’s father was also his tutor.”

“Correct,” Papa modestly said.

“Cato is a brilliantly trained scholar. Even Ficino was impressed with your son’s learning.”

Papa beamed with pleasure.

Botticelli then turned to me, taking up my hand to kiss it. He stared up at me. “Cato never told me his sister was a twin. The resemblance is uncanny.”

“My brother has probably told me more about you,” I said, working hard at elevating my voice to a womanly timbre, “than he told you about me.”

We all heard a low groan from the prisoner.

“Strappado,”
Botticelli muttered. “It’s said that when they drop a man from a height—his arms bound above his head—the bones and sinews of his shoulders break and snap.” He could not hide a hint of a smile. “And how is Cato?” Botticelli asked. “We haven’t seen him since Lorenzo . . .” His voice trailed off.

“He’s well,” Leonardo answered. “Traveling in the East.”

“We’ve missed his company.”

“We?”
Leonardo said.

Botticelli moved even closer. “Some of us have recently begun to gather again. Very quietly.” He turned to Papa. “Perhaps you would like to join our little circle, Ernesto.”

I saw a light come into Papa’s eyes. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.”

Savonarola moaned loudly and called out the name of his savior. My eyes were drawn back to the platform as the man was hoisted, his broken legs bumping up the platform steps, and tied to the hardwood stake. Conspicuous in his absence was a priest to give the convicted man his final blessing. The hooded executioner, allowing his charge no time for last words, unceremoniously wrapped a knotted rope around the Prior of San Marco’s neck.

“Is it not fitting that he should die in this way?” said Botticelli.

“He will no doubt burn in the Hell of which he so eloquently spoke,” Leonardo answered with more than a little bitterness.

As the garrote tightened and the beady eyes began to bulge, I turned away. Leonardo and Papa did the same. None of us enjoyed the suffering of our fellow humans.

“Are you leaving now?” Botticelli asked. “Before he burns?”

“Knowing he burns is enough,” Leonardo said, clapping a hand on Botticelli’s shoulder.

“It’s good to see you, my friend,” Sandro said. He nodded to Papa. “Ernesto.” Then he bowed to me. “Signora da Vinci.”

The three of us made our way against the crush of Florentines, who, whether ghoulishly pleased or mournfully beating their breasts, were now surging forward to witness the final moments of the monk’s agony.

A pair of boys who still had the short-cut hair of Savonarola’s angels, but now dressed as other lads of their own age, stood on a cart on tiptoe, straining over the crowd to view the spectacle.

“They’re hoisting his body to the top of the pole!” one cried.

“They’ll soon light the fire!”

“Come on,” said the other. “I don’t want to miss it.”

They jumped down from their perch and plowed into the seething mass. The boys would no doubt be at the front when the torch touched the tar-soaked pyre of the one they had not so long ago called “the Mouthpiece of God.”

Just as we reached the edge of the piazza a great cry went up from the assembled, and a blast of heat at our backs signaled Savonarola’s destruction into ashes.

My stomach turned at the thought of what must now be occurring, but as I felt arms on either side of me sliding round the crooks of my elbows and guiding me away, I heaved a long-awaited sigh of relief.

 

With every step we took farther from the square our spirits grew lighter. I noticed people coming out from the houses and standing in the streets, silently gazing in the direction of the pillar of smoke rising from the piazza. It was hard to know what they felt—free-falling terror that the man to whom they had entrusted their immortal souls was no more, or the sweetness of waking from a long bad dream.

With a glance at one another, Leonardo and I stopped in our tracks, pulling Papa to a rather sudden halt.

“What is it?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“No, Papa.”

“Why have we stopped?”

“We are on Via Riccardi.”

He turned and looked at the boarded-up shop in front of which we now stood.

“Is this the house I own?”

Without another word Leonardo and I steered him to the end of the block and back into the alley. When I pushed open the gate we were greeted by the sight of a riotously overgrown garden and two carts piled high under their canvas covers.

Leonardo was pulling vines away from the green and gold apothecary sign, which was propped up against the back wall. While faded, it was still as pretty as the day he had painted it.

“What have you done, Caterina?” Papa said, never taking his eyes from the wagons.

“You might ask your grandson. He was the one who stopped in Vinci before coming here.”

“I saw my uncle Francesco while I was there,” Leonardo said. “He helped me pack your things up.” He turned to Papa. “He sent you his fondest regards.”

I had unlocked the door and stepped inside. My father and son came in after me.

The look on Papa’s face was one of childlike wonder, and I admit I was not unaffected myself. The years had gone easier on the house this time. Some rodents had had their way with the bins, and some spiders with the ceiling corners, but when I opened the door to the shop I was shocked that aside from a mild mustiness, the ghosts of herbal fragrances still lingered in the air.

Papa walked through but it was too dark to see. Leonardo went to the front door and pulled it open. He was confronted by nailed boards, which he commenced to kick out with his booted heel. He was making a terrible racket, but I found myself transfixed.

All I could hear was the tinkling of the bell on the lintel above the door, and I saw again the moment I had first laid eyes on Lorenzo standing there, taking in the sights and smells of my brand-new apothecary. I smiled recalling how we had laughed, nailing the bell in place, the first of our many adventures together.

Suddenly the room was filled with light, Leonardo having also pulled away the boards from the large window.

I heard my father’s exclamation of delight, and watched him turn round and round, taking in the lofty ceiling and soft green walls and shelves, the dusty but still bright white marble countertops.

“What’s all the noise?” I heard a man cry, and looked through the front glass to see Benito, a grown man, now carrying a small child in his arms, a young woman and a twelve-year-old boy beside him. Leonardo and Benito were embracing.

Papa looked at me questioningly.

“Our neighbors. Lovely neighbors. We should go out and let Leonardo introduce us.”

 

Benito had helped us empty the carts, moving our belongings into the house. His sweet wife, Elena, had rushed next door for a pail and rags, and had gone to work scrubbing the shelves and counters, so that by the time the light started to fail us, Papa and I and Marcello—a jolly boy with a thousand questions—had already begun returning a few of the pots and jars to their proper places.

Leonardo himself carried our boxes of precious books to the first-floor sitting room, and our neighbors promised to come back for all the help they could possibly give.

Earlier, outside the shop, when Leonardo had introduced me to Benito as his mother, I’d seen a look in my old friend’s eyes that told me he knew the truth. Perhaps that he, of all the men and women I had met in my male disguise, had known it all along. But nothing was said. There were no sly smiles of collusion. Just a quiet and graceful acceptance that Cato would not be returning and that Caterina, Leonardo da Vinci’s mama, had suddenly come to live with her father above the apothecary next door. There was also a suggestion made that Marcello had not been promised into any apprenticeship yet, and perhaps if Ernesto had need of a helper . . .

When our neighbors had gone we lit three torches, and with silent purpose climbed the stairs. We rose past the sitting room, and then my bedroom, and up a final flight to the third floor. We stood, the family trio, staring at the laboratory door.

“It is safe, Mama,” Leonardo said. “We have made it safe to think again. Inquire. Experiment.”

I inhaled deeply and pushed it open.

Before us was a scene that reeked of fear and hurried leavings. An overturned bench. A glass beaker broken on the floor. The alchemical furnace dusty and stone-cold.

A fierce upwelling of visions assaulted me—
opening this door thirty years before, the four walls that had admitted me into a brotherhood of brave and venerable minds; the elderly man standing behind me who had dared school a daughter in the secrets of enlightenment, making possible that admittance; the son without whose close presence I refused to live, he whose love had drawn me to this city, this house, this room; and back further still to the night in Vinci that, in my agony of lost love and Papa’s fear of losing me, we had together allowed his alchemical fire to die
.
I saw Vespasiano Bisticci squinting over a thousand-year-old manuscript and calling out its mysteries as Ficino, Landino, and Pulci debated the properties of quicksilver. I saw dark Lorenzo in his loose white shirt propped lazily on the stool, knees wide, arms open and inviting me into his embrace. And of course that smile.

“Help me with this,” I heard Leonardo say. He had dragged several rotted boards from the shop up the stairs. He told Papa and me to break them into small pieces, then began stacking them in the furnace. I saw him pull from his satchel his folio, ripping out several sheets of paper, crumpling and stuffing them beneath the wood.

My heart began to race at the thought of the sudden industry and the purpose of what we were doing. I glanced at Papa. His eyes were aglow.

We gathered round the furnace, and in the moment before Leonardo struck the flint, we each whispered our own blessing.

“To the great teachers . . .”

“The Eternal Wisdom . . .”

“The heart that loves . . .”

A tiny flame was held to a corner of crumpled paper. I watched breathless as it caught and burned blue for an endless moment, then spluttered merrily to yellow white, setting the tinder-dry wood alight. The heat was sudden, warming our faces and chests.

My father’s hand on my shoulder drew me to him. Leonardo he had embraced with his other arm. Papa was strong again, as he had been on returning from his travels. Even now he grew younger, not older, with every pop and crackle in the furnace.

“Is there thanks enough to offer?” I heard him say.

“Between the three of us,” I replied, “there is more than enough.”

A knot in a burning board exploded noisily, causing us to startle, then laugh at our fright.

Leonardo, as though roused from a reverie, sprang to the woodpile and threw more fuel on the blaze. And it
was
a blaze, burning with an almost conscious force. Dead for so long. Given new life. Our promise of eternity.

Leonardo would surely be seeing the Phoenix rising from the cold ashes, taking to the air as he dreamed himself doing.
Would
succeed in doing one day
. Leonardo in flight
. The thought made my own heart soar.
The oiled canvas wings in graceful curves, his long hair whipping behind him, the wind lifting him higher and higher into the clouds.
. . .

“So many books to unpack,” I heard Papa mutter with delight.

“You’ll show me which ones you want brought up here, Grandfather,” Leonardo told him, “and which ones should be left in the sitting room.”

“There are some he likes to keep at his bedside,” I told my son, “to read by candlelight.”

“Come, tell me now.” Leonardo took the lead, and Papa followed him down the stairs.

I added one more large wood fragment to the furnace, thinking ahead to the future source of its fuel. There was enough from the boarding-up of the shop, I thought, surely enough for this night. Tomorrow we would put in a large supply. Young Marcello would have his first job helping Papa.