The Red Lily Crown (36 page)

The bookshop of Giacinto Garzi, formerly the bookshop of Carlo Nerini

TWO DAYS LATER

R
ostig and Seiden—Nonna called them Ruggi and Seta, their names in Italian, but Chiara could never think of them by anything but the names the grand duchess had given them—lay curled together in the patch of morning sunlight streaming through the shop's front door. She crouched down for a moment and stroked Rostig's sun-warmed fur. They were white-faced and ancient, both of them, and Seiden was as blind as Nonna was, but Nonna took good care of them, berating Cinto fiercely every time he said dogs had no business being in a well-run shop. And they were always together. They had each other.

This is Rostig. Rust-red, in your language, for the color of his head and ears. His mate is Seiden, silky one.

The grand duchess's voice, the day of old Duke Cosimo's funeral. Not a demon-voice, just a memory, bittersweet. That had been the day she herself had first met both the grand duchess and her hounds. Isabella had been there too, weeping for her father. Dianora, whispering about her lovers. Eight years ago. Saints and angels, how much had happened since then? And yet here were Rostig and Seiden. They were all that was left of that day.

Rostig opened his dark eyes and looked at her sleepily. He moved one paw, pushing her hand to continue petting him. She did. He sighed, contented, and closed his eyes again.

“I'm glad you're here, Chiara.” It was Mattea, who was standing behind the counter. In the past year she had shot up a handsbreadth in height, grown womanly curves, and been betrothed to Simone di Jacopo, a wool-dyer's son who lived on the Via dei Calzaiuoli near the guildhall of the Arte della Lana. “I must run to the market to buy a fish for our dinner. Will you watch the shop?”

“Where's Cinto?”

“I don't know. He and Nonna were quarreling, and I think he went down into the cellar. Lucia and Nonna—”

I think he went down into the cellar.

“Go get your fish,” Chiara said. “I'll manage things here.”

She walked through into the kitchen. Nonna was standing by the window, her hands bundled up in her apron, outrage and misery and humiliation—humiliation? why?—in every line of her body. The cloudy whiteness had almost completely blotted out the sharpness of her eyes. Lucia faced her, holding a half-peeled onion in one hand and a knife in the other.

“What are you doing, Lucia?” Chiara said sharply. “Where's Cinto?”

“It's none of your business,” Lucia said. “None of it—what I'm doing, or what Cinto's doing. The shop is ours now, all of it, from the attics to the cellars. I'll cook what I please for dinner, and Cinto will go where he pleases in his own shop. Go back to your palaces, Chiara, and leave us alone.”

“Nonna? What's the matter?”

Slowly Nonna drew her hands out of the folds of her apron. Her right wrist was twisted at an unnatural angle. Already bruising and swelling were beginning to come up.

“He took the keys away from me,” she said. “He went down into the cellar. Chiara, I couldn't stop him. Forgive me.”

He went down into the cellar
.

And there was only one day left. One day.

“
Che infido sdraiato stronzo
,”
Chiara said under her breath. “Nonna, I'm sorry for swearing. I'll fetch you the grand duke's own physician to put your wrist right, and I promise you he'll never touch you again. I promise.”

She picked up Nonna's broom—that long-ago night, Pierino Ridolfi doubling over with a grunt of pain as Nonna rammed her broomstick into his belly, where was Pierino Ridolfi now?—and started down into the cellar. Behind her she heard Lucia shouting, “He'll touch whoever he pleases, and don't you dare call him such names! It's our shop now!”

The lanterns in the cellar were lighted. It smelled of damp earth and wood, acids and alkalis, metals and powdered minerals and hot stone. Chiara looked over the wall and saw before anything else Babbo's book spread out on the table. Then she saw Giacinto Garzi with his back to her. He might have been a collection of sticks in a fine robe. He should spend less time picking out expensive clothes and letting Nonna and the girls wait on him, she thought, and more time doing the heavy work of the shop. She tightened her grip on the broomstick.

“Cinto,” she said.

He turned around.

He'd opened the athanor and taken the nascent
Lapis Philosophorum
from it with nothing more than his bare hands. It was melting into his flesh. For one endless moment they both looked into the heart of the universe. Then the cellar disappeared in a sheet of flame.

Chiara

The Red Lily Crown

The Monastery of the Santissima Annunziata, called Le Murate

15 SEPTEMBER 1582

C
hiara stretched a coarse cloth over the tub of laundry and tied it down to each of the six rings around the rim. Her hands were red and chapped and her knuckles were swollen. She scooped wood-ash from a basket and spread it over the cloth. Dipped up a panful of boiling water from the cauldron. Poured the water over the ashes. The water would leach out the lye, and the lye would soak through the heavy linens and burn out the stains and then—

“Chiara.”

She jumped. She dropped the dipper.

It was only Donna Jimena. She wore the white wimple and veil and plain dark tunic of the lay sisters of Le Murate, but Chiara had never quite managed to think of her as Suor Jimena. Whatever she was called, she was pretty much the only person who ever talked to Chiara. The nuns kept silence, and the other lay sisters and servants made signs against the evil eye when they passed near.

“Suor Maddalena told me you would not eat or say your prayers this morning,” Donna Jimena said.

Sick all the time, that one, the sisters whispered to each other, not caring if Chiara heard them or not. Possessed, some of them claimed.

After a moment, she said, “Yes. I think—I remembered—some things.”

Donna Jimena's poor wrinkled face crumpled together all the more with sadness and apprehension. “Leave the laundry for now,” she said. “Let us walk in the cloister.”

Chiara untied her laundry-apron and took it off. She didn't wear a habit or a veil herself, just an old wool gown, patched in a dozen places, with an apron and a coif over what was left of her hair. She didn't remember her hair being cut but Donna Jimena had told her—they'd cropped it off in the first days she was at Le Murate because they hadn't been able to make her talk sense, and everyone knew it cured madness to cut the hair close to the scalp and bind the head with poultices of valerian leaves.

The valerian hadn't helped. Her hair had grown back but it wasn't silky and dark anymore—
so dark as to be almost black, with glints of blue and violet
, someone had said once, in another life. Now it felt like an animal's pelt, matted and sticky, short and straight and coarse. There was a raised half-moon shape over her left ear. When she touched it, her head throbbed with pain.

She walked out into the small cloister with Donna Jimena. The air was clean and cool. It was good to be outside. For a while they simply walked, with Vivi pacing beside them. Vivi was always with her. How Vivi had come to be at the monastery, and Rostig and Seiden who were so old and frail and cosseted by the affection-starved nuns—that was part of what she had remembered.

“It's nice out here,” she said. “I don't walk in the cloister very often.”

“The fresh air is good for you, whatever the infirmarians might say about evil humors. Chiara, my dear, if you have remembered— Tell me. I will tell you what I know, if you are able to listen.”

“I remember,” Chiara began. Then her thoughts cut off. They did that sometimes. She'd be thinking something or saying something and everything would just stop. She shook her head and said again, “I remember.”

Donna Jimena said nothing. They reached the end of the cloister walk. An apricot tree was espaliered against the old stone of the wall. It was heavy with fruit, red-blushed golden apricots, their scent sweet with a faint green edge of bitterness.

The velvety skin of an apricot falling in spirals on the scrubbed wood of a table. Juice dripping in slanting sunlight, gleaming and sweet.

Ruan.

She drew in her breath and clenched her fists and said, “I remember Ruan.”

There. The word had been said.

“Magister Ruanno dell' Inghilterra,” Donna Jimena said gently. “He brought you here, my dear—is that what you remember?”

“A little. I remember the dogs, Vivi and Rostig and Seiden. He brought the dogs.”

“He did.”

“I remember screaming. My head hurting.”

“And before that?”

“I don't know.”

Donna Jimena took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “There was a great blast like cannon fire that utterly destroyed your brother-in-law's bookshop. Magister Ruanno said it was as if someone had fired a bombard from the cellar straight up into the upper floors of the building. The front of the shop was untouched, and the two old dogs not even scratched.”

Suddenly Chiara remembered Cinto—who was Cinto?—with a light in his hands.

“I saw it,” she said.

“Yes. You were apparently thrown backward by the force of the blast. Magister Ruanno said it was the only thing that could explain how you survived, and that he had seen such things happen to gunners sometimes.”

“I remember a light. I remember Cinto. Who is Cinto?”

“Cinto was your brother-in-law,” Donna Jimena said gently. “Giacinto Garzi. He was married to your sister Lucia.”

“Lucia,” Chiara said. The shape of the name on her lips and tongue was familiar. “I remember her shouting. Shouting at me, and at Nonna—”

She stopped.

Don't be sad,
nipotina. Nonna's voice. Not like the demons' voices. It was kind. There was love and even laughter in it.
It was Cinto's fault, not yours. I was standing there, listening to Lucia shriek at you and wishing I had two good wrists to shake her, and then all of a sudden I just wasn't in my body any longer. My wrist didn't hurt anymore, and none of my joints ached, and I could see. I could see like a young girl again.

Nonna.

Nonna was—

Nonna was dead.

Suddenly Chiara's knees wouldn't hold her anymore. She collapsed to the graveled pathway and put her face down in her arms and wept.

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” Donna Jimena said. “I knew this day would have to come and how hard it would be for you. Yes, they are all gone, Cinto and Lucia and your Nonna. Your family's shop is gone, and everything in it. Your younger sister Mattea—her betrothed's family broke off the arrangement because of all the talk, and she has gone to live in Pistoia.”

Chiara choked into her folded arms in her anguish. Vivi pressed close, making a soft whining sound in her throat.

After a while there were no more tears. Chiara's eyes were swollen and her throat was raw. She straightened and wiped her nose on her sleeve like a child.

“Ruan?” she whispered. “Can I see him? It feels like it's been forever since—since I came here.”

“Five and a half months, since the first day of April. Chiara, when he brought you here, you and the dogs, he gave the nuns gold to take care of you. He came back every day for three days.”

He came back for three days.

Five and a half months had passed.

“So after three days he went away,” she said. Her chest ached, as if her whole body was breaking apart. “He went home—home to—to Cornwall. A labyrinth house and a moon mine.”

“No,” Donna Jimena said. “I saw his face when he carried you into the infirmary, Chiara. He loved you, and if he never came back, it can only be because he is dead.”

Which was worse? For him to be dead, or for him to have abandoned her?

“Dead how? Why?”

“I do not know, but— How much do you remember about the grand duke? The Medici?”

“I remember—” She stopped. Her head felt as if it was—well, what? A dry, cracked garden patch that had suddenly been watered and stirred up with a sharp rake. Inside the soil, seeds were cracking open and pushing their leaves and stems up into the light.

Poison stems. Poison flowers.

Where had she seen poison flowers?

“I remember the taste of hot spiced wine,” she said slowly. “A moonstone the size of an egg, on a silver chain. A necklace, rubies and pearls, and riding a horse alone at night. A book—my Babbo wrote things in the back, in his own handwriting. A laboratory in a lemon-house—”

So many pictures crowded her mind so quickly she couldn't keep track of them. They overwhelmed her. Some of them were beautiful. Some of them were terrible.

“The grand duke,” she said, in a voice that didn't sound like her own. “Yes, I remember him. And Ruan—”

Ruan lying on the floor at the grand duke's feet. His blood spreading over the polished marble like molten metal, copper and iron, metals from the heart of the earth.

Was that real? Or had it been a dream?

“After the three days, one of the grand duke's physicians came instead. It was as if he knew Magister Ruanno would not come back.”

Ruan had wanted to kill the grand duke. Had he tried? Had he failed?

“The grand duke's physician brought the medicine,” Donna Jimena said. “He instructed me—”

“The medicine?”

“The clear liquid I put on your skin on Sundays after Mass. He said it was very strong, and that I should put one drop on your skin, no more, once every seven days. I have done it every week, after those first three days—well, you know that.”

One drop, every seven days after taking the Sacrament at Mass, never twice on exactly the same spot of naked skin
.

It was one of the poison-flower thoughts. A demon whispered
sonnodolce
, sibilant as a snake.

One cannot simply start and stop taking the
sonnodolce
at will. By continuing to take it, you will be bound more closely to me, and all the more willing to do whatever I ask of you.

Her thoughts stopped. Her throat burned with hatred. Did she hate the grand duke? Why?

“Yes, the grand duke himself. Chiara, listen to me. You are a prisoner here at Le Murate. The grand duke's prisoner.”

“Why?”

“It is something to do with what happened at the bookshop. There was no natural explanation for it, and the grand duke believes you were practicing alchemy.”

Chiara said nothing.

“I have not questioned it, Chiara—I have been so happy to have you here and take care of you. You are all I have of the old days, you and Vivi, Rostig and Seiden.” Her faded eyes filled with tears. “All I have of my dear Isabella.”

Isabella. Another seed cracked and another tall spindly plant reached for the light. Isabella de' Medici, the grand duke's sister, in a sky-blue velvet night-gown. Isabella, dead, murdered—

Chiara closed her left fist. The two crooked fingers. That was why she had the two crooked fingers. That was why she hated the grand duke.

Why did he keep her here, a prisoner of the
sonnodolce
as much as the monastery walls? What did he want from her? Had he killed Ruan, or had Ruan gone away?

And Nonna was dead.

It was all too much. She felt sick and dizzy. She pushed herself to her feet and said, “I don't want to remember any more.”

Donna Jimena put her arms around her and held her close. “You do not have to. You do not ever have to remember it all. You will be safest if you do not—the grand duke will leave you alone, and I will take care of you.”

You will be safest
.
The grand duke will leave you alone
.

Had there been a time when she had lied and intrigued and contrived her way through the grand duke's court, the palaces and laboratories and gardens, the great entertainments and secret alchemical transmutations? Was there a reason why the grand duke was keeping her a prisoner here at Le Murate and not throwing her in an oubliette or having her killed?

There had to be a reason.

If she could remember it, she would have one small scrap of power. If she could remember it, and keep the grand duke from knowing she remembered it, perhaps she could—

Could what?

What did she want? To be free? Free to do what?

She took hold of Donna Jimena's shoulders and pushed herself back, as gently as she could. “I don't want to remember any more today,” she said. “But I will remember, in a week or a month or a year, or in all my life if it takes that long. One day, when I'm strong enough, I'll remember everything.”