The Poet Prince (38 page)

Yet on early mornings when the mist covered the Arno and Florence was peaceful before the bustle of the day began, she would take walks along the river and allow herself to weep at the injustice of it all.

Each time she bled, Colombina prayed to Maria Magdalena to forgive her for violating the laws of the Order and sobbed over the loss of a child she would give anything to bear.

Niccolò was back in Florence, home from his latest excursion. These were always the hardest times for Colombina.

When he was away, she was the absolute mistress of her own destiny, spending most of her time with Ginevra and Simonetta, and with the
Master when he was in the city, pursuing the business of the Order. And her sweetest, most secret stolen moments came about when Lorenzo was able to meet her at the Antica Torre. Here they were alone in their own world, together as the most intimate of friends and ardent of lovers. It was blissful.

But when Niccolò returned from his seafaring adventures, she was expected to be home with him as a proper wife should be. It was wretched.

On this particular night, Colombina had thought she would be safe enough keeping her meeting with Lorenzo, as Niccolò was going out to the tavern with his friends to regale them with his latest tales of pirates and lost treasure, and likely a few ribald details about slave girls and harlots in Constantinople. None of these details bothered or even interested her, so long as they meant that Niccolò wasn’t around to demand her attention physically or emotionally. When he did decide he wanted to take advantage of his marital rights, he was relatively quick about it, for which Colombina was grateful, although it had given her cause to grieve for all her sisters in the world who would never know any other kind of husband, never know what it was like to have a man make love to them with all his heart and soul, as well as his body, in the way that Lorenzo did with her. So many women only knew arranged marriages to the Niccolòs of the world, who might just as well have had a hole in the bed as a flesh-and-blood wife.

She was thinking about this as she made the walk home from her all-too-brief evening with Lorenzo, about how blessed she was to have found him and how enriched her life had become through the teachings of the Order. How she wished she could share these understandings of love and equality with women who would never know anything of the kind. That was one of the objectives of the Order, and certainly Colombina’s dream—to bring about a time when arranged marriages were seen as a crime committed upon women, and female children would no longer be treated as pawns in a family’s game of wealth and power.

As Colombina rounded the corner to their city house, she stopped.
There was a light on in Niccolò’s study. Why was he home so early? She would have to think of something, quick, to explain away her absence in the night like this. She knew it was risky to see Lorenzo during the periods when Niccolò was home, but it was far more painful to be separated from her beloved for too long. She was willing to take the chance, always. She gritted her teeth and entered her house, praying he would be preoccupied with some new map or idea for a voyage.

“Where have you been so late into the night?”

Niccolò was waiting for her, and he was drunk.

“I was with the Gianfigliazza women, preparing for the Saint John’s Eve carnival. We have so much to do that I lost track of the hours passing. I’m sorry, Nico. Can I get you something? More wine? Come, have some wine with me and tell me of your evening.”

It was usually easy enough to distract him, but not this night. Something—or someone—had gotten to Niccolò Ardinghelli.

“You . . . are . . . a liar!” Niccolo yelled as he slapped her, hard enough to make her stumble as he continued his tirade, stalking her across the room. “Do you think I don’t know where you are? Where you go when I am not in Florence? Do you think I don’t know that you whore for the Medici every chance you get and have done so for years?”

He slapped her again. She fell to the ground this time with the force of the blow.

Colombina picked herself up, her expression reflecting a blend of dignity and contempt. She faced her husband and said with quiet strength, “I do not whore for that Medici. I give myself to him freely. I always have and I always will. Lorenzo has my heart; why shouldn’t he also possess my body?”

Her husband was incredulous. He blinked at this, trying in his drunken state to grasp the reasoning. “Because . . . because you are my wife.”

“You just said I was a whore.”

“You behave as one!”

Lucrezia allowed the bitterness of her enforced years with him to flow from her lips for the first time. “Perhaps you’re right on one ac
count. A whore beds a man because she must for her very survival. It is an act of empty rutting, done by a woman with no choice. So if I am a whore for anyone, it is for you.”

Niccolò sputtered for a moment, taken aback by a defiance he had never before seen in a woman, much less his wife. Blinded by rage, he swung, hitting her full in the face with his fist. Horrified by what he had done, he ran from the room and closed himself in his studio. Colombina picked herself up, gingerly touching the place where his fist hit the mark. Moving to the mirror that graced her entry hall, she examined her face. Niccolò’s blow would leave a welt and a deep black bruise on her cheekbone for days to come. And there was a meeting of the Order in three days’ time.

Colombina arrived three days later for the gathering of the Order at the Antica Torre. Niccolò had avoided her since the night of her beating, out of a combination of guilt, anger, and humiliation. The positive side effect of this was that she was able to attend this meeting without asking for his permission.

She had done her best to conceal Niccolò’s mark on her face, rubbing it with ice and with an oil from the apothecary. While it was less vivid than before, there was still a purplish shadow, which was impossible to disguise completely. She knew that Lorenzo would notice instantly and demand an explanation. She had prepared one, not because she cared about protecting Niccolò, but because she cared about protecting Lorenzo. He had enough worries without her victimization adding to them. And she believed that her husband had felt real remorse. While he was a braggart, Niccolò wasn’t inherently evil, and she was convinced that this was a singular incident and he would never hit her again. Colombina had to forgive him, as that was the Way of Love. Besides, Niccolò would be leaving again soon enough. She just needed to be patient.

Careful to enter the Torre in the presence of others so that she would
not have to answer Lorenzo privately, Colombina knew that she could not avoid the issue indefinitely. As he came to kiss her in greeting, he stopped suddenly and raised one gentle index finger to run it lightly over her face. His questioning of her was deceptively gentle.

“What happened here, Colombina?”

She could not look at him and lie. Lowering her eyes, she replied, “It’s nothing. A careless cleaning woman did not dry the floors properly after washing them. She left water on the marble for me to slip in. I hit the side of my face on the stairs.”

Lorenzo said nothing. Instead, he used that same gentle finger to lift her chin and forced her to look at him. He held her eyes for a moment, and Colombina shuddered at what she saw in them. In all their time together, they had never truly quarreled. Their love was so strong, and so selfless, that there had never been any lie or betrayal between them. But Lorenzo’s dark eyes were like burning coals as they bored into hers. He released her, gently, and walked away. For the remainder of the evening, he sat on the opposite side of the room and refused to speak with her. He was morose and contributed very little to the evening’s conversation. When he did speak, it was in clipped tones and short phrases. It was clear to everyone that il Magnifico was in a difficult mood, and the meeting was cut short with little of the usual socializing at the end.

As the gathering dispersed, Colombina looked at him across the room, her eyes full of tears. She hated seeing him like this, and hated even more that she was the cause of it. She could see his chest heave with a sigh as he walked deliberately toward her. Pulling her aside to a corner of the room, he finally spoke to her. His voice was soft, almost a whisper, incongruous with the harshness of his words.

“Lucrezia . . .”

Lorenzo’s use of her given name was a more painful blow to her than anything she had endured at Niccolò’s hands. Since their days as children in the forest, he had never called her anything but Colombina, even in public. The lines were etched in his face, and he spoke slowly and with emphasis, not in his characteristically clipped tones.

“While I understand why you have lied to me, I pray that you will
not do so again. There are few left alive whom I trust completely, and I do not think I could bear it if you ceased to be one of those.”

With a lover’s instinct, she reached for him. “Lorenzo, please . . .”

There would be no tenderness this night, not from a man wrestling with the mighty demons that were threatening to close in on Lorenzo de’ Medici. He held up his hand, gently but firmly, to stop her from coming any closer.

“I am not finished. I have a message for your husband, and I ask that you deliver it exactly. Tell Niccolò that you were with me tonight—it is clear that he already knows that we are still together—and tell him that on this night Lorenzo took a vow before God. Tell him that I vow, if he ever strikes you again, I will kill him with my own hands.”

Antica Torre, Florence
present day

M
AUREEN WEPT AS
Destino related the story of Lorenzo and Colombina and the terrible heartache of their enforced separation. He had summoned her to Petra’s apartment to spend time with him after watching her connect so deeply with Colombina’s images in the Uffizi.

“The time returns, right?” she asked him. “Colombina and Lorenzo could not be together in any traditional way because of their circumstances. And the same is now true of Bérenger and me. Over and over again, the cycle happens. Jesus and Magdalene, Matilda and Gregory, Lorenzo and Colombina. And now Bérenger and I are not going to be able to be together as we dreamed, just another couple separated by circumstances that they must honor. So is this my test?”

“What do you see as your test?”

“Can I be as selfless as Colombina? Can I accept that Bérenger’s destiny is to be a Poet Prince—and raise another—and that this is more important for the world than our own happiness?” She fought the tears as she continued. “But why? That’s what I want to know, Master. Why?”

Destino had heard this question many times over the centuries, a question he was never allowed to answer directly. It was not for him to give his struggling students the answers that they needed, for there was no learning in that, no permanent change to the soul. They would have to find the answers on their own and make their own choices. Over and over he had endured the pain of watching those he loved fall, and he prayed it would not happen again.

“But you see, my dear, that is precisely the point. The time returns. But it doesn’t have to. It is a choice.”

Maureen shook her head, confused. “You’ve lost me.”

Destino explained in his wise way, always careful to share the wisdom, yet equally determined not to give away the answers. “If I had to choose the one factor that caused our grand plan for the Renaissance to fail, more than any other, it was the enforced separation of Lorenzo and Colombina.”

Maureen was shocked at this. “Really? More than the politics, power, and religion?”

“Yes, because their separation was caused by all those things. If the Medici had fought to allow Lorenzo to marry for love, rather than power and alliance, the world might look very different now. Yes, the Donati opposed the union, but I believe they could have been bought. Piero was weak, and Cosimo was ill, so we did not push for the marriage as hard as we might have. We are all to blame for that failure. We did not stand up for the power of love.”

Maureen listened, fighting through the circumstances, the concepts, her own pain and frustration. “So what are you saying? That the time returns, but it shouldn’t? That it returns precisely because we keep getting it wrong?”