Signora Da Vinci (54 page)

I pushed the furnace door closed very slowly, loath to lose sight of what we had begun today, but as it clanged shut, despite the lost sight of the alchemical fire, I knew how it would burn—unstoppable, warming and fomenting the minds of all who lay themselves open before it.

I sighed with the deepest pleasure, remembering the Medici—Lorenzo, his father, and his father’s father, wondering now if, from where they stood, they saw that the Light of Reason had been lit once again in Florence.

Somehow I believed they did.

CHAPTER 42

Papa had insisted on staying the night at his new home, but Leonardo and I had come back to Castella Lucrezia and both of us, exhausted from the day’s events, slept well into the next morning.

When I came down the stairs into the sitting room I saw he’d set up an easel near the street window, a thin wood board standing up in it. He was laying out his brushes and some colors he had just ground up himself.

He smiled when he saw me. “Will you indulge me with a sitting today?”

“How can I say no to you? And what a day of celebration it is, Leonardo. I believe I will be able to breathe more easily than I have in a very long while.”

As he arranged several down pillows on the chair he had set in place, I thought,
For better or worse I am with this man, have been with him as a barnacle holds fast to the hull of a ship, and that after all the years grow together—wood, shell, muscle—into one impossible amalgam.

I went to stand before the undraped work. It was one I recognized. I’d begun sitting for it after my second arrival in Milan. It was quite small, bordered on either side by a painted pillar. The background, exceedingly dark, even foreboding, featured a winding road that led to a rocky inlet below, confined on all sides by jagged, fearsome-looking peaks and precipices. That background had always seemed a strange compliment to the woman of the portrait, who sat so softly and perfectly composed in the foreground.

I found her somehow familiar, somehow unrecognizable. Surely she was me. But how would I know? I had spent so little time over the years appraising myself in a mirror. This woman was dressed in the low-bodiced olive gown that Leonardo had gifted me when I’d taken back my womanhood, its pale green cape slung over her left shoulder. The long tawny sleeves had been pushed up her arms in many soft folds, allowing the gently crossed hands to be seen clear above the wrists. The woman in the painting was younger than me by some thirty years, and was strikingly beautiful. If there was something slightly masculine about the broadness of her face and the defiant glint in the eyes, it was balanced, if not overridden, by the feminine quality of the features and an overwhelming sense that this creature was, if not the Madonna herself, a mother who had known every pleasure and every pain of womanhood.

Leonardo’s artistry had rendered more than the details of her features—the black hair parted in the center curling prettily on the softly rounded breasts, a delicate fringe of dark eyelashes, rosy pink nostrils, and pulsing blue veins in the hollow of her neck. He had imbued in the woman’s expression an air of all-knowingness and deep compassion.

“Tell me honestly”—Leonardo had come to stand by my side—“did I ever look this way?”

He regarded his work for some time.

“You were far more lovely. Your chin was more oval than square. But the eyes are yours, and the lovely high bones of your cheeks.”

“Will you
ever
finish it?” I said, teasing him.

“I think it will take a lifetime to satisfy me.”

He led me to a chair, tucking some cushions into the small of my back and under my arms for comfort, arranging my hair around my shoulders and covering it with a fine black gossamer veil. He arranged my hands right over left, as the woman in the painting, and gently pushed my sleeves away from my wrists.

“I so wish Lorenzo could have lived to see this day,” I said.

“He knew it would come,” Leonardo replied, moving to one side to observe the canvas in a different light. “There was so much
Il Magnifico
had already accomplished before he died. The Academy. The library. His part in the conspiracy.” Leonardo’s expression grew suddenly shy. “The two of you together. . . .”

I looked down at my hands as I added, “The Great Work.”

“Have I not captured it in your portrait? All of it? The dark. The light. The female. The male. Your magic. Your memories.”

I sighed. Aristotle had rightly said that memory was the “scribe of the soul,” and Aeschylus believed it “the mother of all wisdom.” But the great sage Pericles spoke most truly for my life, I thought then, saying that what you left behind was not what was engraved in stone monuments, but what was woven into the lives of others.

“So many memories,” I murmured, my eyes softly tilting upward, beginning to see it all again.

“Come, Mama,” said Leonardo in the gentlest voice, “before I lose you entirely to the past . . . won’t you give me a smile?”

EPILOGUE

I would say I hope this letter finds you well, but I am not at all certain that this letter will find you at all. I write from the deck of the Portuguese galleon
Isabel
, flagship of Captain Fernão Cabral’s fleet, finally within sight of our destination. It is hard to breathe, though whether this stems from the excitement of our imminent landfall or the air so hot and humid it feels thick as soup, I cannot say.

 

She sat on the thronelike chair in her sleeping chamber and sighed deeply. Her eyes were closed, not out of weariness but of boredom. Bianca, the Holy Roman Empress, felt this day, as she did every other day, neither holy, nor Roman, nor imperial. She had just sent away her ladies and that insufferable religious tutor Maximilian had imposed upon her—he and his droning scriptural lessons every day but the Sabbath.

Her husband had let go the one intellectual companion she most valued—her old and beloved Greek master—replacing him with the hated Catholic cleric. She was, Maximilian commanded her, to dedicate herself to embroidery and lute playing, though she was forbidden to sing as her voice, in his estimation, was as screechy as a cat in heat.

This treatment, she knew, had been punishment for failing to provide Maximilian with children. Heirs—male or female. “What earthly good is a barren wife?” he said with repetitive cruelty. “More particularly a barren archduchess?” She was beginning to believe such sentiments were true.
Why did I have to be a wife at all?

Bianca rose, cursing the jewel-encrusted gown she was forced by her high and mighty station to wear every waking hour of the day. She moved to the window and looked out at a bleak wintertime Vienna. Court was here now, and not Innsbruck. She wondered which palace she hated more.

Not the palace,
she corrected herself.
The people who live in it
. All of Maximilian’s time and thoughts were spent on armies and weaponry, allies and enemies. Italy, the Swiss, Turkish pirates, the blasted French. Whenever she’d tried to engage him in conversation on any other topic he’d snapped at her. “Politics, not philosophy, rules the world,” he liked to say. “War, not words, forms the future.” His heart was as cold as the frozen ground in the courtyard.

At least to her. He doted on the children from his first marriage—Phillip, who had been blessed with so much unnatural beauty for a Hapsburg man he was called “the Handsome,” and Margaret, who, to everyone’s chagrin, had been uglier than sin but imbued with a mind like a steel trap.

Maximilian did spare Bianca the humiliation of a string of mistresses, though sometimes she wondered if the endless flowery poems he wrote about the wooing of and marriage to his first wife, Mary, were not somehow more insulting.

The knock on her door was startling, lost as she’d been in the self-pity that had in the last months settled over her thoughts like a heavy blanket. “What is it, Marta?” she called out to her lady. The door opened and the woman entered wearing an expression Bianca had never seen on her maid’s face in all the years she’d attended her.

“There is a . . . crate for you, madam. A rather heavy one.”

“For me? From whom?”

“I don’t know,” Marta said, her eyes wide with excitement. “It has an odd smell about it. Something like spice.”

Bianca gestured to have the thing brought in and four footmen—one on each corner of the red-painted wooden crate, thickly banded by iron—set it down heavily in the center of the empress’s Turkey carpet.

“Shall I open it for you?” said one of the servants.

Bianca eyed the box warily, but excitement was beginning to rise in her. “Cut the bands and loosen the lid,” she ordered. “Then leave me.”

“My lady,” Marta pleaded, “at least let
me
stay with you when you open it. There’s no telling . . .”

“It’s too small to be hiding an assassin,” Bianca said. “I’ll take my chances alone.”

When they had all gone she circled the red crate and one by one discarded the iron bands. With some effort she wrenched off the top, and with a crash the sides collapsed outward, leaving in the center of her floor what looked to be an ordinary Italian marriage chest. Whom-ever the bride had been, she’d clearly not been a noblewoman. The birds and flowers were painted with only moderate skill, and no gold or precious gems had been used in its decoration.

Why would someone send me a marriage chest?
she wondered. She sat back on her throne chair to gaze at the thing. She was not afraid of what she would find inside. And she was exceedingly curious. She just wished to prolong the mystery of it. Mystery had become so rare in her life of late. She would savor the moment. Think of every possibility of the treasure within it, and from whom it had come. She began this exercise, but found her mind blank. She could not, after all, conceive of anyone who would care to send her anything.

Bianca jumped up and strode to the marriage chest. The lid came up easily, and a strong whiff of pungent spices wafted up in a fragrant, invisible cloud. Her jaw dropped at the sight of the contents.

Books. Many books.

Some were bound in leather and looked to have come from Guttenberg’s revolutionary press. Some were rolled parchments. Others were ancient manuscripts decorated in gold leaf. Now her pulse pounded in her neck. She lifted one vellum volume and opened the cover
. The Sonnets of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
She placed it aside, then took up another. It was in Greek—Plato’s
Timaeus
. Her heart soared at the sight of that beloved language.

Beneath was a huge tome. She went to the lectern on which her Bible lay open and put it on the floor. She carried over the heavy book and laid it open to a random and well-thumbed page. It was in Latin, but the contents were certainly Hermetic in nature.
Are these recipes,
she wondered,
for alchemical processes?

Now she removed a muslin bag that reeked of an exquisite and exotic fragrance. She loosened the string and peered inside. Smaller muslin bags! Each must hold a different spice. They smelled, unquestionably, of the East.

Then there were more books. Some in Hebrew, a language she had never learned. Here was a scroll in a leather pouch. It was incomprehensibly old. With all the delicacy she could manage she unrolled it.
Antigone
! Bianca could not be sure, but it occurred to her this might be—no, could it possibly be a copy from the time of the great play-wright himself ?

She slowed her plundering of the chest as she could not bear the thought of coming to the end of her gifts. But here was something different. A large, flat notebook. Nothing on the cover revealed its contents. This she took to her bed and laid out carefully upon her ermine coverlet.

She opened it to the first page and was baffled. There were sketches of a boxlike device with lines emanating from it. The rest of the page was filled with handwriting that was quite unreadable. When she looked more closely she saw that the script was written backward, from right to left.

Bianca turned the page. Here was an array of eight connected rectangles with the sun’s rays from a nearby window bouncing off them. And another page with the box device again, but this time she could see quite clearly a brilliantly rendered sketch of a naked man lying on a table nearby, his arms crossed over his groin.

Sweet Jesus,
she thought.
Blessed Isis!

Despite her desperation to view the rest of the notebook, she found herself unerringly gentle. But within a few pages she was sure—here was Leonardo’s shroud! The fruit of the great conspiracy of which she had been a part. Had the maestro sent her this box full of treasures?