Wolves in Winter (7 page)

People fear what they do not understand
. The morning after I met Margherita, I woke in the dormitory to find my poor cricket’s cage crushed about him, his hard crust of a body
smeared to an ugly green-grey sludge by a heavy clog. I tried to scoop up the mess, for I knew I should be punished for dirtying the floor, and as I was scraping his last, pathetic home into my
hands I heard a giggle behind me. I dropped the wreck of the cage in the brimming slop bucket where it stank in the corner of the room and went down to my work.

That night, and the next nights for weeks, I made my way across the river to Santo Spirito while the other servants stitched and gossiped. Margherita, I learned, was a great deal more than a mad
old tramp. She was one of the wise women of Florence, respected and consulted throughout the city, like Suora Domenica, or Donna Ciliego, who lived like Margherita in the church porch of Santa
Maria Annunziata. Margherita produced a sort of costume for me from her inexhaustible heap of rags, a silver silk scarf which she arranged loosely about my neck and shoulders to show off my hair,
and a necklace of polished coins which she said came from the time when Florence belonged to the Etruscans. When I was dressed, we would sit in the porch, munching companionably on whatever
delicacy her visitors had left for her, and wait for the clients to arrive.

‘You’re my green girl,’ she explained the first evening, ‘my little wood-nymph, eh,
ciccia
?’

I was still puzzled as to what she wanted from me, how she thought I could help her. After we had waited a while, a woman set her hand cautiously on the pilaster of the porch, as though she were
trying to knock. Despite the still-sharp heat of the evening, she was wrapped in a heavy brown cloak, but beneath it I could see the hem of an apricot-coloured mantle and the tips of embroidered
silk slippers. Not a woman then; a lady. Her face was mostly concealed, but I could make out her anxious dark eyes, sore-looking as though she had recently wept. She looked surprised to see me and
went to draw back her hand, but Margherita patted her rag pile invitingly.

‘Don’t worry, my dear. This is my new assistant. All the way from Greenland, where the sun always shines and the ice never melts. See that hair, those eyes? Her mother was from the
forests of the north, where the trees stretch for months and her father –
hee hee!
– her father was a werewolf! Don’t mind, don’t mind, just my little joke.
She’s deaf as a post and dumb as a basket, ain’t you,
ciccia
?’

She nudged me sharply with her elbow. It seemed very stupid, but I could see the lady watching me intently, so I tried to put on a suitably vague expression.

‘But she can see, my little mooncalf, she can see, oh yes. Now, dear, you tell Margherita what the trouble is.’

The lady leaned forward and whispered urgently in Margherita’s ear. Margherita began nodding sympathetically. ‘Oh he has, has he? Oh, the pig! Pigs, all of them. Three months
married, you say? And him carrying on already? Oh, you want to know, do you? Well, a wife’s got the right to be sure. Don’t want him bringing home anything nasty, do we? Now,
let’s see what we can do.’

She scrabbled in her smelly bedclothes for a while before triumphantly producing a little velvet purse from which she extracted two stones, one green, the other blue.

‘Emerald,’ she announced, ‘all the way from India, and a sapphire from the court of the Shah of Araby! Which is it to be, mooncalf?’

Even I could see that the stones were more pebble than gem, but I felt I knew what Margherita wanted as she proffered her fists to me. I closed my eyes and mumbled some incoherent sounds, which
in truth was as much as I could manage. Blind, I tapped Margherita’s left hand.

‘Sinister!’ she crowed. ‘Now dear, you take that home and slip it under his pillow when he sleeps. Any stinking vice that’s in him’ll cloud the stone, see, and then
you’ll know for certain. Mind and bring it back now, tomorrow evening sharp.’

The lady scrambled to her feet, stowed the stone in her purse and took out a coin, which she gave to Margherita, making us an awkward bow of thanks before stealing away. Margherita waited until
her shadow disappeared in the direction of the Carraia bridge before confiding in me.

‘Oh, you’ll do,
ciccia
, you’ll do very well. I knew it, first time I saw you. Gives it more of an air, see? A change. There’s an idiot boy over at San Marco
prigging half my business.’

She saw my look of confusion as I gestured towards where the lady had gone.

‘Oh dear, I know. Out all night at the
bagnio
, sure as sure, her man. Well, maybe she can keep him at home before the watch has him. A kindness, dearie, a kindness.’

In all the time I knew Margherita, I was never certain of how much she believed in her ‘kindnesses’. That her clients did, I was sure, for it soon became clear that the Florentines
deserved their reputation for superstition, but I never quite decided whether Margherita was a charlatan, a fairground trickster, or something more. Sometimes it seemed as though she did not quite
belong to the everyday world, as though her distracted ramblings were not eccentricities but messages from another place. But as soon as I began to believe in her a little, I would see the
sharpness in her eyes when she bit on a coin, and change my mind, thinking that after all it was merely harmless cunning.

She was certainly popular, which suggested that her pronouncements and remedies had some effect. People of all kinds came to her. Sometimes it was an anxious mother, too poor for the apothecary,
who wanted a remedy for an ailing child, sometimes a portly merchant wanting to know the most auspicious time to set out on a journey, sometimes a labouring man who thought his apprentice was
stealing from him. Mostly, though, Margherita dealt in love.

Love, as I saw it then, was to do with lack and money. Love was the pain of mourning, as I mourned my papa and, more dimly and sweetly, my mother. Or, it was money – Adara’s
business. Margherita’s clients seemed to see it much the same way. They lacked, they yearned, they wept and they paid. And it was as well that Margherita believed me dumb, for I learned more
from those anxious confidences of what happens between men and women than I had ever perceived in my brief period as a tenant in a whorehouse, and the knowledge shocked me beyond words. So many
ways for the flesh to ache with desire, so many ways to profit from it. An elderly husband anxious to please his young wife was prescribed cow dung beaten up with fresh eggs and white wine, a
servant girl whose sweetheart had taken up with another was advised to steal a lock of his hair, soak it in her menstrual blood and hide the charm beneath his bed for a month. Margherita’s
clients believed she could make wayward lovers return, indifferent lovers fond.

She dealt in consequences, too. A betrothed bride anxious that her fiancé should not learn she had gone too far with an earlier beau? Margherita assured her that her virginity would be
restored with alum boiled in linen. A harassed mother of ten who could not bear to bring another mouth into the world? A scraping of a mule’s nail melted into the wax of a sacred candle and
placed on her body when her husband came to her in the night should ward it off.

None of the remedies Margherita recommended were in the least like the medicines my papa had so carefully prepared after consulting his books. I could not believe that any of them truly worked.
But so long as I made my silver necklace jangle and looked wisely into the distance; so long as I made a dumb show of choosing a charm from her hands or tracing the line of a beloved’s fate
in an eager palm; she and they were happy. As was I, for each week Margherita would give me a silver florin, which I tied in the corner of my skirt and smuggled silently into a hole I had worked in
my pallet at night.

I had begun to have a plan, a real plan. At the end of the summer, I calculated I would have a stock of money enough for a suit of plain clothes and a carter to carry me away from Florence. It
was so easy to slip away each evening and one night I should simply not return. I doubted that I was valuable enough in that great and complex household for anyone to care for my loss anyway. I had
no thought of where I might go, or how I should live, but the thought of escape was enough to sustain me through long days in the sweltering kitchens. My dowry of books was gone, stolen and sold by
Adara, but I could read and write, I knew Spanish and Italian: I should find something, somehow. I dared not count my coins at night, for fear the chinking would alert those three pairs of spiteful
blue eyes, but I thought of them, each solid weight another step to freedom. For a time, my dark dreams were suspended by hope.

As midsummer drew near, the evenings grew longer. Amidst flurries of preparation, sweating and swearing from the servants, Donna Alfonsina had finally left Florence with her son and her new baby
daughter for the cool of the hills, but the palazzo remained busy. Unusually, Piero de Medici had remained in the city. The courtyard still thronged with Medici familiars, and I often recognised
Messr Bibbiena, Piero’s secretary who ordered the household, passing to the great staircase with a stern, urgent expression.

Something had entered the palazzo that summer, something that groped with cold, probing fingers into the upper regions of the house, seeking to clutch Piero in its chilly fist. I listened more
intently than usual to the talk in the kitchens and the laundry, but the world of the slaves was so confined, contained within the tiny limits of the offices and those brief moments of leisure
beneath the tree that we servants might well have been as mute as I feigned each night with Margherita. I sensed that something had changed. I felt the same rage I had experienced on the Genovese
ship that brought me to Italy – I was no more than a mote of dust, swirled about in the robes of the great and shaken off where they would. I never understood the forces that moved me. I
wanted
to understand what was happening in Florence, but the coins Margherita gave me were too precious for me to dawdle on my nightly walks to Santo Spirito in the hope of overhearing the
citizens gossip as they gathered on the benches. I could hardly ask questions, for my dumbness, which I had adopted in fury, was now my most precious disguise. Yet there
was
something awry
in the city, a hint of suspicion and fear that I recognised from my last months in Toledo; and angered as I was by my own insignificance, I was determined that this time I should protect
myself.

With the long evenings, I grew bold, relishing my freedom from the confines of the palazzo. The gates were barred at the last bell, but I discovered a way to prolong my absences. Set into the
wall near the porters’ bunk was a tiny window, for putting out alms, or receiving supplies in plague times, when big houses were shuttered down to keep quarantine. I found I could wriggle
through it, small and slight as I was. It was hard to hoist myself up the wall outside, but I had always been light and agile and my muscles were lithe and taut from the hard work in the kitchens.
If I wanted to return after the bell, I would push the shutter ajar as I left the courtyard and work my fingers above the wooden lintel when I returned. I was not afraid of the porters –
rough men who spent their evenings in the taverns and slept it off in the lodge – and even if I were discovered I didn’t imagine I had anything worse to fear than a whipping. The
thought of a few minutes of pain did not deter me. It was a strange way to learn courage, I thought ruefully; that it comes when one has nothing one cares to lose. But I was never caught.

As the city emptied during the suffocating heat, business grew slow. One evening, Margherita and I had sat a long time in the porch, with no clients to serve. As the sky turned from bright blue
gold to a soft purple, she stretched herself, sending up the usual foetid whiff from her nest, and asked me if I was hungry. I nodded. There was plenty of plain food for the servants at the
palazzo, but I hankered after the savouries I smelled in the streets each night.

‘Come on then, mooncalf.’

She tottered to her feet and arranged herself for travel, which took quite some time, as all her oddments and mysteries had to be stored in two sacks, which she pushed into a corner of the
porch. Presumably no one would dare to steal them. As she stood, it occurred to me that I had never seen her legs, but she set off at a sort of bounding hobble, and I was surprised to find I had to
trot to keep pace with her. We turned to the left, slapping at mosquitoes as we followed the river along the Borgo San Frediano until we reached the city gate, which Margherita circled around,
taking us up a rise covered in scrubby trees, where the city wall ran flush against the steep hillside. We climbed laboriously up the slope and descended on the other side, leaving Florence without
passing the gates. As I picked my way along behind her, I could smell woodsmoke and roasting meat and hear music, a reedy piping with a drum beneath it.

‘Nearly there,
ciccia
,’ Margherita encouraged.

We arrived at a scene from carnival. Three shabby wagons with tattered streamers were drawn up in a circle, with placidly cropping horses staked to rings beyond them. In their shelter, a fire
burned on a flat rock, tended by a man whose massive shoulders and thick black beard distracted me for a moment from noticing that he had no legs. He was seated on a low wooden trolley with little
wheels, which he manipulated dextrously with strong hands, turning himself this way and that to baste a line of rabbits turning on a spit. On the ground beside him sat two young women, wearing
colourful cloaks over men’s breeches and shirts. A thick-necked dwarf in a soldier’s jacket was idly turning cartwheels around them, flicking tiny spurred boots into the air. I had seen
dwarves before – they were popular servants for grand people in Toledo. Two more men, long nosed and grey eyed and alike as reflections in a looking glass, were mending a pair of metal hoops
with wire, as though it were usual to carry out such work in nothing but red satin drawers. The music came from another man, whose eyes were bound by a black cloth to advertise his blindness,
puffing into a long metal pipe and keeping time on a tambour with a drumstick held between his bare toes.