Wolves in Winter (13 page)

‘Mistress? But he has a wife,’ I answered stupidly, still fuddled from the memory of the daydream.

Cecco gave me a pitying look.

‘I forget, you’re as innocent as an angel. I’m hungry.’

We ducked into the sala to stuff our pockets with hot pork rolls, chewy and musky with sage, and then ran through a miasma of scent and music to the long gallery on the upper floor where Piero
was receiving his guests. He was bowing to Donna Alba, bent over her hand, his eyes raised flirtatiously to her haughty gaze. The crowd closed around us and Cecco motioned me to follow him beneath
the feet of a credenza. I felt a splinter graze my knee as we wriggled along the dusty tunnel, re-emerging at the other side of the room. Cecco peered eagerly at this beautiful, scandalous woman.
So there we were, our heads goggling out like double gargoyles, when a pair of young men stepped towards the couple and the younger of the two attempted to take Donna Alba by the hand.

‘Giovanni and Lorenzo,’ whispered Cecco.

I knew the young men. They were Piero’s cousins, descended from a junior Medici branch, but even as the wealth of the chief family was in decline, these two had made a fortune dealing in
grain and now people said they were even richer than Piero himself.

‘The lady is engaged,’ Piero was saying.

‘Indeed she is,’ replied Giovanni, his tone polite but his face arrogant, ‘to me.’

Donna Alba sent her grey eyes between the two Medici men, clearly delighted to be the subject of such a prestigious quarrel.

‘It’s spring, Giovanni,’ added Piero condescendingly. ‘There’ll be plenty of girls who’ll be happy to have you as a partner.’

‘Quite so, sir. But Donna Alba shall dance with me.’

‘I think not.’

By now the whole room was hushed, the guests no longer even pretending to ignore the scene. Piero took a step towards Giovanni, drawing himself up, all the pride of the Medici in his gait, but
Giovanni did not recoil.

‘This is my house, sir.’

‘For how long?’ Giovanni sneered.

Piero’s hand shot out and cuffed the boy across the face. It was a gentle blow, as one might pat off an unruly dog, but of course that only made the insult worse. I could hear Cecco
holding his breath beside me. For an endless moment, Giovanni stared at Piero, a flush of rage darkening his features, his hand playing awkwardly at his right hip. His brother Lorenzo stepped
forward and placed a warning hand on his arm. Giovanni recovered himself, with effort, and made a brief bow.

‘Of course, cousin. How could I so forget myself?’ Signor Bibbiena, Piero’s secretary, signalled frantically to the musicians, and Piero handed Donna Alba forward. The other
couples lined up, but the measure had not begun before Lorenzo had pushed Giovanni from the room, their boots sounding above the hum of the pipes.

‘Oh my,’ said Cecco, ‘oh my. There’ll be trouble now.’ Had any other man committed such an insult, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de Medici would have called him out to
fight. As it was, he was dishonoured because he could not in duty challenge the head of his family. The powerful have two methods for dealing with trouble. To cozen and charm, to bribe and beguile
until the wound is healed over, or, having made an enemy, to strike him down at once. Was it that image of crumbling strength in his courtyard that goaded Piero to choose the second?

*

Time stretched like a lute-string. Through another summer the city broiled beneath smudged skies. Each day the peg turned, tighter, tighter. I was no longer summoned daily to
the
scrittoio
, Maestro Ficino was closeted all day with Piero and the candles burned in his chamber long into the night. Tighter, tighter, until by September the very breath of Florence
seemed to hum with the tension.

I wandered the streets with Cecco, disconsolate, idle. The only life in the city appeared to be among the astrologers, who set up on street corners and filled their purses with the coin of fake
omens as the people, usually so bustling and busy with getting, turned bench-whistlers, their shop shutters closed to the beat of the sun, their minds skidding between doom and the false hope
peddled for florins. Through the streets came trails of children, led by one of Savonarola’s black hounds, solemn in unbleached linen, their hair roughly shorn, holding out baskets into which
housewives tossed their hoarded finery. They sang as they marched, vanishing and reappearing like puppets between the curtain of the sun’s glare and the cast iron shadows of the streets.
Tighter, tighter.

And then the string snapped, and the wolves came over the Alps, just as the monk had said they would.

The French were in Milan, in Pavia, at Piacenza, they were crossing the Venetian territories towards the border with Tuscany.

‘Come on, Mora, get up! They’re here!’

Cecco was in my attic room, stumbling over an old thick sword bound with a bright sash wrapped several times round his narrow boy’s waist. His face was bright and excited, like a child on
carnival day.

‘What do you mean they’re here? The French?’ I leapt out of bed in my shift, it didn’t seem to matter since we were all to be murdered.

‘No, not in Florence. At Fivizzano. The messenger’s downstairs, with Messr Piero. They sacked the whole garrison.’ He drew his hand slowly, with relish, across his throat.
‘Come on!’

‘Where to? Besides, you look ridiculous. Where d’you get that?’ I grumbled, peeved that Cecco, his exuberance usually kept so earnestly in check within the palazzo, was
behaving like – well, like a boy. And he had not noticed that I was a girl and that it was improper for him to be in my chamber.

We banged down the stairs, past a line of gentlemen who were hissing and gesticulating frantically amongst themselves, their faces unshaven and wan in the early light. The courtyard was full,
all the house slaves exclaiming and chattering, hardly paying any mind even to Donna Alfonsina, who stood embracing her brother, the white linen of her nightgown falling softly over the armour that
covered his chest. Men heaved heavy chests for the cart that stood at the gateway, the cooks were rushing out with bundles of provisions, steam still rising from new bread.

‘Messr Paolo goes to Sarzana,’ hissed Cecco. ‘The Orsini troops are mustering for Florence.’

‘How do you know? Scribbler.’

‘Exactly. So you can shut up. I know because Ser Piero was writing letters all night with Maestro Ficino, I was
scribbling
away. So then I went home and my uncle gave me his sword,
so there. And I have an important message to take, do you want to come with me or not?’

I nodded, my bad temper forgotten in the excitement.

‘You’d best leave that, all the same,’ I said gently, ‘if we’re in a hurry.’

Reluctantly Cecco unstrapped the sword and laid it under a bench. He grabbed my hand and we were out in the streets, running with no care for propriety, giddy with the unreality of it all. After
the frantic energy of the palazzo, the city seemed frozen, the streets empty, only a few groups pressed together in the church porches.

‘Cecco, what has happened?’ I panted.

‘You should see it from the walls. Whole caravans of people, running from them. They say all the girls have been shut up in convents already. Rapists, they are, the French. Not that
you
need to worry.’

I felt my temper rise again. ‘Stop it! It’s not funny! Besides, they won’t come here, because Ser Piero won’t let them.’

‘What if it’s not up to him any more?’

It seemed that it was not. Cecco’s message was for Messr Lenzi, one of the richest and most important men in the city. Florence needed money, Piero said, money to pay the
condottieri
who would man the forts on the frontier, and even the Medici coffers were not deep enough to pay. But even now, Florence would not give up its gold, and when Cecco took up
Lenzi’s answer the household heard Piero bawling with rage.

The French were at Vigetano, they were moving on Pisa. And the broken lute-string of time skeined the city, looping itself around the house on the Via Larga and tightening like a noose. The
quarrel at the spring ball, that disdainful slap that Piero had dealt his cousin Giovanni, was duly paid out. The brothers, Lorenzo and Giovanni, sent messages to the French king to claim that the
Medici were finished in Florence and that he would have their support. This the whole household knew, for Piero screamed louder at their treachery than he had done at Messr Lenzi’s
refusal.

In her Roman way, Donna Alfonsina insisted that carts were loaded with linens and tapestries to be sent to the Medici house at Cafaggiolo, where Piero insisted his unruly relatives should
retire; but the fine lawn sheets were barely unpacked from their lavender-scented wrappings before Giovanni and Lorenzo had escaped their polite exile to join King Charles. The French were at San
Stefano, they were at Pontremoli. And then, Piero too was gone.

He left quietly one morning, dressed in his plainest clothes, like the merchant his father and grandfather had always pretended to be. Without him, the palazzo collapsed into the lassitude which
had overtaken the rest of the city. Donna Alfonsina kept to her room, the household gathered on the bench by the tree to whisper and speculate. For two days, Cecco did not come. I took my courage
to find Maestro Ficino in the
scrittoio
.

‘What is it?’ he asked irritably, looking up from a pile of papers, for all the world as though the world beyond his books was not ending. ‘Oh, you, yes, Mora. Well?’

‘Please, Maestro Ficino, I wondered . . . That is, I thought you might perhaps tell me what is happening?’ I feared he would rebuke me for impertinence, but he looked at me
wearily.

‘I had hoped, Mora, that perhaps you might tell me.’

I considered a while. ‘I have – I have those dreams,’ I said at last.

‘Dreams?’ he asked eagerly.

‘I have had them since – well, before I came here, Maestro. I don’t know, but I’m afraid it will go badly for Ser Piero.’

‘You have had visions? You have been visited?’

‘No, Maestro, nothing like that. I just – dream.’ I spoke to him then of the omens, the beasts fighting in the sky, the burning sword, the shadows crossing the mountains, even
the small shattered ball, broken in my hand in the church porch.

‘Why did you not speak of this to me before? I did not bring you here to stay dumb. God knows you wasted enough time with your play-acting in the kitchens!’

‘I’m sorry, Maestro. Please don’t be angry. I didn’t understand, I haven’t ever really understood. You have been very good to me, you and Ser Piero. But I thought
it was the books you wanted, my father’s books—’

‘No, you little fool, it was you! I had them search for you, buy you, but I was told they had brought the wrong slave. I had merchants out of Savona seeking you a year before your brawling
found you out.’

‘Maestro, forgive me, but I don’t understand.’

He scrabbled through the papers on his desk, but as he made to speak, a servant entered with a message.

‘Ser Piero is come, Mora. I must speak to him quickly.’

*

Piero’s guard wore deep scarlet, the Medici colour. Their swords clinked against their spurs as they swung into their saddles. We came into the courtyard as they clattered
into the Via Larga, and Maestro Ficino was buried in a crowd of supporters who fell in behind them, shouting ‘Palle, palle!’ I glimpsed Cecco trotting proudly among them, his red hair
brighter than ever under a scarlet cap. The broad man next to him must be his father, I thought. I tried to make my way towards them, but the crowd was too dense. Every now and then I paused to
stand on tiptoe, to check for the sight of the cap, hard on the hooves of the rearguard’s horse. Maestro Ficino was calling in his creaky scholar’s voice, ‘Wait, wait!’ but
Piero was already gone.

‘I’ll follow them, sir,’ I threw over my shoulder, then I was swept up into the roar of noise and pounding feet. We twined our way to the Piazza Signoria, which had already
filled with young men and boys, the faces of a few old women bobbing among them like wizened apples in a barrel. This crowd was silent, though, sullen, and the cries of Piero’s supporters
gradually fell away until the only sound was the tread of the horses as they approached the gate of the Signoria. But the gate did not open.

Piero sat easy on his horse, still and erect, as cool and handsome as if he had stepped down from the walls of his chamber. Indeed, the whole of Florence seemed to be there, captured like
maquettes
arranged ready for a painter’s brush. Nothing in Piero’s countenance betrayed the fact that for the first time in his life, he had been disobeyed. Then the door opened,
but the threshold remained barred. The sentry’s message passed through the crowd like a breeze over a wheat field. Piero might only enter alone. He was to disarm and make his way into the
Signoria like a petitioner, through a side door. Piero’s supporters in the crowd got up a few cries of ‘Shame!’ but they rippled away as Piero stayed like a statue on his
horse.

More and more people were arriving in the square, the crowd was pressing and beginning to surge, I had lost sight of Cecco and was anxious for him. Stooping and twisting, I worked my way back
through the crowd to the corner of the Cione loggia where I joined a group of watchers squashed together precariously on the outer pedestal. Eventually, the gate opened, but again Piero did not
enter. He dismounted and spoke to a group of men, he was refusing what they asked, I could see it in his face. The gate slammed shut. Moments later, the first toll of the huge city bell, the
Vacca
, rang out over the city.

The sound exploded in the crowd like the crack of a whip. As I clutched for what purchase I could, I saw a swarm of men surround Piero, who was struggling to mount his horse. I could not
understand what had changed, how Piero’s command over Florence had collapsed so utterly, but then I fell down amongst the rushing boots, and could think only of how to force my way through,
to find Cecco, to reach the palazzo.

Stones began to fly, bodies staggered around me, my arm was crushed beneath a running foot. Blind with terror, I half-hunched, half-crawled my way through the press of bodies, trying to follow
the edge of the piazza where it would meet the Via Larga. I heard the rally of the Medici supporters – ‘Palle, palle!’ – and hoped that Cecco was safe. Then I was clear of
the square and running, just as a crash of hooves behind told me that Piero and his supporters had also broken through. I pressed myself against a shuttered
bodega
, flattening my body
against the deadly charge, the animals’ flanks all but brushing my face as they hurled past. I tried to fall in behind them, but as I turned I saw that the way was blocked by a horrible mass.
Twisted figures, braying faces, tumbled gargoyles, all screaming, ‘
Liberta
,
liberta
!’