Suicide Kings (3 page)

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Cardinal Lajolo quickly took control of matters. Priests and church laborers formed a barricade around the body of the nun while several men fetched a bier to carry the corpse away. The funerary attendees added to the little cluster around the body, further obscuring it from view. The crowd served to draw the attention of some passersby however, and a few strangers drew into the circle out of curiosity. They reacted with horror, a few women screamed on seeing the body, although most remained nearby asking questions and discussing the matter solemnly.

The nun’s body—Diana realized she had never gotten the woman’s name—splayed on the cobblestones, a pool of blood filling the little spaces between the bricks. Her eyes stared vacantly and her mouth held open in a skeletal grin, displaying the remains of a few rotten teeth. One arm bent back around behind her and both legs were twisted like dry twigs. A slimy loop of intestines emerged from within her robes like an umbilicus.

Diana took deep breaths to retain her composure. She’d seen bodies at funerals before, and the relics of saints of course, but nothing like this. She’d been talking to the woman only moments before. Around her, the city of Firenze continued in ignorance. In the distance music played and revelers laughed. Only those few who passed by this street learned of what had happened. Soon the news would pass all over the city. What effect it might have, Diana could only wonder. The violent death of a nun, even in a modern city like Firenze, could inspire all kinds of superstitious talk. Particularly of late, with the mad friar Savonarola in power, giving wild sermons on witchcraft and heresy. And why shouldn’t people be superstitious? After all, Diana herself had seen what looked like a phantom with an inhuman voice. Perhaps evil spirits were at loose in the city.

A gendarme arrived to investigate the disturbance. He asked questions, but from his voice, Diana guessed that he was not sure he had or wanted authority over something that had happened on church property.

“Did she jump?” the gendarme asked, looking to the top of the dome.

“It is a shame,” said a man in the crowd, a funerary attendee by the name of Orsini. A business partner of her father’s, he’d come with his wife all the way from Roma. Now he clucked his tongue. “Sometimes women don’t realize the convent is not the satisfying retreat from real life some think.” Beside him, his exquisitely dressed wife shook her head, agreeing with the shame of it all.

“She did not jump. She was pushed,” Diana told them. The assembly murmured and the gendarme looked at her without speaking. “I saw it.”

“Did you know who pushed the sister?” asked the gendarme.

Diana faltered. “I saw only a figure cloaked in black. When he turned to me I could see no face under his hood.” Another excited murmur went through the onlookers. Diana closed her eyes, steeling herself. She knew half the throng spoke of demons loose in the city; the other half asked if she were mad.

“What were you doing up on the dome?” the gendarme asked with a tone that suggested he identified with the latter, more skeptical half.

It occurred to Diana that relaying the entirety of her conversation with the nun to a crowd that increasingly included strangers might not be in her best interest. Fortunately, she was diverted from answering the gendarme’s question by Signore Orsini. “The young woman has just lost her mother, with whom she was very close. I think the shock of it has influenced her sensibilities, quite naturally of course.” He looked at her with his eyebrows raised, his expression sympathetic and meaning no offense.

“We saw no one go up to or down from the dome besides yourself and the nun,” added his bejeweled wife.

“I am having the dome searched as we speak,” said Cardinal Lajolo. “There may be places a man could hide.” As he spoke several attendants arrived with a thick bier and rolled the nun’s body on to it. One used a small spade to move the coil of intestine on as well. This completed, they covered the body with a shroud and hoisted it waist high. The attendants hurried to get the body inside and out of view. The assembled multitude remained standing around the blood pool on the ground. “I wish I had a good sense of what has occurred,” Cardinal Lajolo implored. “The disposition of the body is at stake. If she has killed herself, then her soul is damned and she cannot be buried on consecrated ground.”

Fury grew in Diana. They really weren’t going to take her at her word, preferring to believe instead that she had been stricken mad with grief.

“If my daughter says she saw the nun pushed, then she was pushed,” her father said at last, his voice composed, yet commanding. “Is there anyone here who has known my daughter to be prone to lies or flights of imagination?” The chorus of onlookers remained silent. Even if they had thought such a thing, there were few here who would be keen on insulting her father. The Savrano family never enjoyed the kind of power and influence that the Medici family had possessed before being cast out of Firenze. Nonetheless, Signore Savrano conducted lucrative business with many of the assembled men and had their respect. None would want to risk that over the matter of a dead nun. “Very well then,” he said at last. To Cardinal Lajolo he suggested, “Given the circumstances, I think it best to offer the nun a consecrated burial. If there’s been an error, would not God understand?”

Lajolo nodded. “A wise suggestion, Signore Savrano.” The cardinal moved off, intent on seeing the matter put to rest. The gendarme retired as well, without further comment, evidently concluding the nun’s death was the cardinal’s problem, not his own. The onlookers began murmuring in small clusters, although individuals and groups began breaking away, drifting back into the night.

Diana felt her father’s eyes on her, but she could not meet them. She felt humiliated. Her reputation had been secured only because he had put his own on the line, and waited some time in order to do so. Many in the mob certainly still assumed she was delusional with grief over her mother’s death. They had only kept silent so as not to offend her father. She sucked in several deep breaths. She did not want to say anything to her father she would later regret. That left her with nothing to say at all. It took her some moments before she could bring her fury and humiliation under control and look at him. His eyes were still watching her, his gaze even and critical. His expression remained difficult to read as it often was.

A moment of silence passed between them. At last he said only, “Come on, it is time to go home.”

Chapter Three

The Flame

That night Diana slept horribly. Exhaustion made her eyes weep and her bones ache, but her mind insisted on going over again and again the sadness of her mother’s death. That she now had the question of her mother’s murder to go over in her mind as well only put sleep further from her grasp. She’d hidden away the parchment the nun had given her…she was too disturbed as it was to try to read it now, and put herself to bed. As the hours went by she tossed and turned, sometimes weeping into her pillow. When she finally drifted off, her dreams turned to the phantom on the dome, who came for her with ghostly arms outstretched. These dreadful images startled her out of her sleep, and she began the cycle again.

The coming of morning radiance brought a new perspective. Nothing could be done about the death of her mother, of course. Yet, if the nun told the truth about her mother’s murder, she could do whatever possible to be sure those murderers were brought to justice. As dawn flooded in through her windows, Diana retrieved the parchment and opened it. She recognized her mother’s handwriting at once. The parchment read:

“…was a mistake. We must acknowledge now that we have been led astray by false witness. Certainly you must agree with me that the events of last night demonstrate this beyond all debate? I am concerned what would happen if my husband were to find out. As of yet he knows nothing of our secret. Yet I fear that continued secrecy will only make matters worse. My conscience is in turmoil about what must be done. I implore you to meet me soon as we must discuss what to do. Meet me at the church on the Piazza Madonna delle Grazie at dusk tomorrow.” It was signed merely, “Isabella Savrano.”

Diana flipped the parchment over, then felt for pages stuck together. Nothing. It was the last page of a letter, but missing at least one other page. Diana did not know to whom the letter had been written, or what it was about. Still, she didn’t much like what she had read. Her mother had been involved in something she had not wanted her father to know about. The obvious explanation was that her mother indulged in a sordid affair with another man. Yet, the tone of the letter didn’t quite seem to match that explanation. And what did she mean about false witness?

Diana sat back in her cushioned chair. She had only moments to herself. If she didn’t appear at breakfast, her father might very well send for her, particularly after such an odd evening as last night. Getting a moment alone from then on would prove difficult. She needed some time to think. She had difficulty resolving her feelings for her mother with the secretive woman in the letter. Diana and her mother had always been close, far closer than she had been with her father. Isabella Savrano had been a vibrant, intelligent, cultured woman who treated her daughter with affection. True, now that she thought on it, her mother might have seemed distracted in the last weeks, but there was nothing that would lead Diana to suspect something so serious that could have ended in her murder.

Thinking of her mother she realized once again she would never see her smile, receive a comforting word or piece of sage advice. Her most crucial human bond severed eternally. Diana shook her head to clear it. Weeping and moping were not going to be sufficient to reveal the circumstances of her mother’s assassination. Diana needed to summon her strength and her guile. Her mother deserved no less. Fortunately business matters would keep her father distracted, as always they did, so she could begin her investigation without hindrance.

Diana soon dressed and made her way down to breakfast. Her father sat already at the table, but he was silent, looking over papers as he ate. Diana remained quiet as well. Their relationship had never been one of idle chatter and given the previous night’s events, she felt even greater distance between them.

Suddenly, as if thinking of it for the first time, he said without meeting her eyes, “I’ve hired you a new handmaid.”

“You’ve what?”

“It’s been more than a month since Silvia left us to get married. The time had come to replace her.”

Diana put down her fork. “Am I not to be consulted in the hiring of my own handmaid?”

Her father sipped at some rare Indian coffee without looking at her or matching her raised voice. “An application came in with excellent letters of reference. She worked for the Orsini in Roma, but is eager to make a move to Firenze. I discussed the matter with Signore Orsini, while you were chasing after errant nuns. Besides, I am the master of this household, and employment decisions are mine alone. If you wish to hire your own handmaid, you have been given ample opportunities to start your own household.”

So that was the matter at hand. At nineteen, Diana was well past the age most young women married. What was worse, in her father’s eyes, was that Diana had turned down several suitors who would have made good matches—one of the Orsini’s sons, the elder son of the Borgia pope, a minor count from France who had been quite smitten with her. None of these men interested her. In truth, she wasn’t sure the life of marriage and children interested her much at all, but if she was going to doom herself to that kind of servitude, she would be sure it was for a man she dearly loved. Her mother had understood that and intervened with her father on her behalf. The result had been for her father to turn down potentially advantageous marriage proposals to his own embarrassment. From his tone, she guessed he wasn’t going to push the issue too far now, but if another good proposal came, he might not refuse it, now that her mother’s influence was gone.

Her father finally looked at her, meeting her gaze coolly and without emotion. “You should have married the Comte du Briere. I think he actually loved you.”

She matched his gaze without fear or submission. “But I did not love him.”

He sighed and put his papers down. “Marriage is not about love. A lucky few might find it, but most of us are content with a passing affection. I’ve never entertained a proposal from a man I knew to be of poor character or likely to take fists to a woman. You must consider what you are to do with your life. You can’t remain in my household forever.”

“I could study medicine at Salerno. I’ve heard that they’ve taken a few women as students.”

Her father drew back in shock, a rare display of emotion. “Certainly not! Even if what you say is true, it is not for women of good moral fiber to enter the trades. You’re a Savrano, for the sake of the Virgin Mary, not a common washerwoman.”

“Medicine is a trade, true, but it is a trade held in some repute. In our own city, the physician’s guild is held in the highest standing. Was not Hippocrates a physician, and Galen—”

“Enough,” her father said with a wave of his hand, having regained his composure. “Next you’ll say you wish to enter the profession of law.”

“Will you at least think on it, Father?”

He looked up at the ceiling as if seeking the hosts of angels painted in elaborate colors there for strength, “If I make you promises you will only get your hopes strengthened for nothing. Medicine is not a woman’s work.” He went back to his papers, evidently considering the matter closed.

Diana groaned and made a big show of pushing away from the table and stomping out of the room, all of which her father ignored. She huffed her way up the carpeted stairs and threw open the door to her room. Slamming it behind her she let out a scream.

“A poor start to the morning, lady?” inquired a voice from the corner.

Diana spun around to find a young woman off to the side folding linens. Looking the woman over, Diana decided that she needed to improve her powers of observation, for the woman was hardly difficult to perceive. Her age must surely be near to Diana’s own, perhaps a year or two younger. She dressed in the formal attire of the household attendees. She would have blended in, had her hair not been a blazing orange-red, cascading down over her shoulders and back without the usual tie or bun the other household women used. Her face was freckled and her skin pale to the point of near transparency, nearly opposite in shade to Diana’s own healthy olive sheen. This must be the new handmaid her father had told her about. Clearly, she was not from Roma, as her father had led her to believe.