Wolves in Winter (10 page)

That first morning, I saw that the young clerk, already grubby with ink, had been set to copying a book I recognised. Maestro Ficino ignored him, but it was all I could do not to snatch the worn
green-tooled cover from his hands. My father’s books were here, in the palazzo. They had been here all the time. For a moment I saw him holding it close to his face in the candlelight and I
almost groaned with pain. I concentrated on chivvying the last of the almonds I had secreted from the breakfast table from the pocket of my cloak, scraping the fine membrane from the nut and
crushing its sweetness between my teeth to taste my home again.

‘Have you seen this book, Mora?’

Maestro Ficino, was holding it out to me, eagerly, as he had done the day before. I was bewildered.

‘The
Corpus
? The
Corpus
of Hermes Trismegistus? This is my own translation,
Pimander
.’

Suddenly my confidence in my new position fell dizzily away. This was a test, and if I failed it, the kitchen and the salt caper berries beckoned forevermore. I was at a loss, I looked around
the room as though the dusty piles of words would show me an answer. Then I caught a glimpse of the boy, seated in the window bay. His cap had slipped off revealing a bright tuft of coppery hair
and his freckled face was focusing urgently on me as he nodded his head.

‘Yes, sir. I have seen it. In my father’s house.’

‘Your father was a follower of Aristotle?’

I began to agree, but the frantic bobbing of the curls allowed me to shake my head in time.

‘Oh no, sir. Not a bit.’

And so it went on. He questioned me for an hour, and each time the boy in the window provided my answer. He spoke of Solomon, and the seven divine arts, of a monk called Michael Scot who had
studied in Toledo hundreds of years ago, of divine beings and heavenly configurations, while I shook and nodded like a marionette, grateful that my hood concealed the frantic gesturing of my eyes.
As I answered, Messr Ficino scribbled on a linen tablet, dabbling at his thin lips with his thin fingers, murmuring ‘good, good, excellent’ until my head ached with the tinny reek of
rose oil and dust and the skin under my arms prickled with anxiety. Eventually, when I agreed that indeed, my father concurred in the belief that celestial bodies were capable of imparting their
powers to terrestrial matter, he reached for a volume and began to leaf through it, concentrating so absolutely that for a long while the only sound in my room was my own breathing and the scratch
of my saviour’s pen. When he looked up, he seemed surprised to see me there and waved his hand absently, his eyes wandering back to the page.

‘You may go now. We shall speak again tomorrow.’

I wandered outside the palazzo, since there was no one to stop me now. The despised tree seemed rather inviting. I sat down and bunched my knees under my chin. Although I had grown taller, I was
still as ribby as a street cat. I thought of walking over the river to find Margherita and astonishing her with my newly discovered powers of speech, and that made me remember my poor little store
of florins and my thwarted plan of escape. It seemed pathetic. Anyway, perhaps I wouldn’t be permitted to walk about by myself, no Florentine lady could be seen in the streets without a
chaperone. But I wasn’t a lady; I didn’t know what I was. Another treasure for the Medici collection, like Maestro Ficino? Or was I to return to the world of cellars and pantries,
leaving the palazzo once a week for Mass and a glimpse of the dull Florentine sky? I could run, I supposed, even yet; but I had nowhere to go and nothing to go to except a heap of rags and a crazy
woman in a doorway. I was bewildered, disconsolate. I had understood so little of what happened in Toledo, and since then I had kept myself alive by deliberately
not
thinking. I was ugly and
scarecrow-headed and there was no one to care for me. Hunched in my cloak, I made myself small and silent once more, and in a while began to weep.

‘Well, here you are.’ It was the boy again, his face washed, looking even younger without the inky shadows.

‘Cecco. Cecco Corsellini.’

‘Mura. I am Mura Benito. Thank you for helping me.’

‘You don’t know anything, do you? How old are you?’

I thought. I had been ten when I left Adara’s house, and I had not minded the days since then. ‘Eleven, I think. Maybe twelve by now.’

He looked at me appraisingly, at my bony ankles sticking from my too short gown.

‘No one would know you were a girl, anyway.’ He seemed to find this satisfactory. ‘Come on then.’

‘Where are we going?’

He made a deep bow from the waist, like a real gentleman, and held out his hand. ‘ To the finest seller of baked apples in all Italy, of course.’

As we passed along the walls of the palazzo, Cecco pointed out the symbols set in stone around the portico, a diamond relief with a pattern of feathers and lumpy little globes.

‘They’re the
palle
,’ he said proudly. ‘Palle. Balls. The symbol of the Medici. From when they started the bank. The palle are like the little weights they used on
the scales to balance the money.’ He lifted his head and proclaimed, ‘
Chi non se volta a esse colle palle gli fie rotto la testa e le spalle
. In other words, if you don’t
support the palle, you’ll get your head broke. We’re Medici, see?’

‘Not really.’

‘Just as well I’m here then.’

Florence was beautiful that day. As we wound our way through the straits of the Borgo de Greci, Cecco kept up a stream of information and it was as much as I could do to trot beside him, staring
about me, while he explained that his family lived in the
gonfalone
, or district of the Golden Lion, where the Medici supporters congregated . . . that his father was a notary, connected
with one of the big Medici estates, but he had plans for his son to become a scholar and sent him to school, where Maestro Ficino had noticed him – oh, and had I tried a hot tripe roll? . . .
The paintings on the walls of the Signoria were of enemies of the Medici who had plotted against them, he continued, and in this bell tower there is a painting of Daedalus by Giotto – did I
know who Daedalus was, or Giotto? . . . Piero was nothing to his father Lorenzo, everyone said so . . . Florentines hated all foreigners and foreigners hated them, because they had the best artists
and architects and poets in the world – did I know who Botticelli was? – which is why Donna Alfonsina was so unpopular with her proud Roman ways . . . Had I tried the sweets from the
nuns of San Nicola, who made comfits for the Medici? . . . This is the bench where Buonarotti had quarrelled with da Vinci – did I know who Buonarotti was? . . . Cecco was learning Greek and
would go to Constantinople once the Pope won it back from the Turks, because that was where all the great learning was and then he would have his own room in the palazzo like Maestro Ficino.

At least I had heard of Constantinople, but Cecco was not impressed.

‘God’s a dog if I can understand what Maestro Ficino sees in you. You’re an ignoramus.’

I was shocked at his swearing, but I knew he was only doing it to show off, and that made me like him better, for it meant he was nervous too. The apple stall was to the east of the city, at the
foot of the Ponte Rubaconte. I sat on a big stone close to the water and batted off the mosquitoes while Cecco scrambled up the bank. He returned juggling two fat apples, stuffed with ricotta and
honey and raisins, the smooth cheese delicious against the scorching, floury flesh. For a while we scooped and slurped, puffing our lips round each mouthful to cool it. I felt braver. Cecco wiped
his sticky mouth on a dockleaf and looked me in the face.

‘How did you get here then? After that business with the angel?’

‘My father gave me to a woman to look after me when they . . . when they took him. But she sold me.’

‘I know. I’ve seen the account books. They paid fifty florins for you, Maestro Ficino bid it. Well, for the books, really. He thinks you can help him.’

‘But how? I don’t understand what he wants from me.’

‘Well, it’s not just because you’re so funny-looking. Sorry. He thinks your father could raise demons, he wants to do it too. And he thinks you know how, ’cept
you’re too dumb to see it.’

I wasn’t sure if I could trust Cecco, but it would come out soon enough.

‘It was a trick. What my father did back in Toledo was just a trick, to save me.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t let him know that. Besides, I saw you in the church, remember, with old Suora whatsername? You put the wind up old Piero good and proper. It was a clever move,
that, hiding the palle under those filthy old scraps.’

‘Messr Piero thought it meant something?’

I knew, though. That same creeping coldness was reaching into my throat as I remembered the hollow golden ball, how it cracked on the stones. The symbol of the Medici and their power.

‘I’m no witch!’ I stammered hastily. ‘That was nothing – Margherita is just a fortune-teller. It’s wrong to even think about such things. They burn people for
less, in Spain.’

‘Not here. In Florence there’s this monk. Savonarola?’ Cecco shook his head despairingly at my blank expression.

‘Well, he’s very powerful. Some say he’s a fanatic, others a prophet. But old Lorenzo, Piero’s father, had him brought to his death bed just to be sure. So this
Savonarola tried to say that Maestro Ficino was a heretic, that his learning was ungodly, but all the scholars in Florence supported him because Maestro Ficino wrote that driving out evil spirits
was holy work, and that learning how to do it was true Christian scholarship. So those hounds of God, the Dominicans, were left chasing their tails.’

‘Wisdom and knowledge shall be granted unto thee, and I will give thee riches and wealth and honour such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee, neither shall any
after have the like.’ The grim faced priest, the man struggling for his last breaths on the bed, the howling shadow beneath the walls.

‘But magic is wrong, surely? Anyway, I can’t do anything magical. My father just made it look like that.’

Cecco considered me. His face was so young, gawky, the planes not settled into their lines, but his smile was so open and his freckled skin so cheerful that I could see in a while he would be
handsome. His face was pleasing to look on. Not like mine.

‘I don’t believe you.’

I thought of my dreams, of the shadows, of my father’s stories of the world beneath the city, of Margherita’s reedy cackle as she told her poor gulls I had the sight.

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, you’ve got a lot to learn if you’re going to keep him happy. And I don’t mind helping if you promise to stop howling the whole time.’

‘Alright,’ I smiled.

‘Besides,’ he added, a note of admiration in his voice, ‘you may be a fool and a cry baby, but I’ve never seen a girl who could fight like you. A proper
she-wolf.’

He pulled me to my feet and we began to walk slowly back to the Via Larga, our faces turned up to the silver sunbeams which alighted on the austere façades of the palaces.

CHAPTER SIX

S
O CECCO BECAME MY GUIDE THROUGH THIS STRANGE
new country that was the upper world of the palazzo. He showed me the
statues, Judith cutting off the head of the tyrant Holofernes, David the naked boy in the courtyard, so beautiful that even in death the feather of defeated Goliath’s plumed helmet snakes
suggestively up his bare thigh. The great staircase, which had represented the horizon of my world when I belonged to the kitchens, was reduced to a thoroughfare I pattered up and down as
confidently as if I were a true Medici. Once we even slid all the way down its polished, pompous length. We chattered on the outdoor benches, tracing their delicate walnut intarsia with idle
fingers, as Cecco proudly explained the history of the family – how they were so rich that they were known as God’s own bankers, how all the princes of Italy revered them and how,
thanks to the Medici, there had been a time of peace and wealth in Italy such as had not been seen since the days of the Romans.

I did not quite believe him. I remembered Piero’s anxious face on the church porch, the prophecy from the
tamburo
, that image of a cold shadow clawing at the heart of the palazzo.
As summer slowly freshened into autumn, the house was as busy as ever; but in the streets there were rumours of complaints against Piero, of scuffles between Medici clients and their critics, and
almost every day there were messengers from Milan, with talk of an alliance made by the Sforza duke with the hunchback king of the French.

There was much talk too of the monk Savonarola, returned from preaching in Bologna where he had dared to criticise Donna Ginevra, wife of the Bentivoglio lord, as a painted whore. Savonarola
spoke of fires and scourges that would overtake Florence, of God’s revenge that would descend on the city from over the Alps.

And I dreamed my dream of the young man in the velvet mask, looking out over the teeming night city, and each time I dreamed it seemed he turned his head a fraction closer, as though next time,
next time, I might see the source of that lazy, patient smile.

Each morning, I went to Maestro Ficino’s
scrittoio
, where he perched behind his desk, huge as all Medici furniture seemed to be huge, with Cecco working away behind him, never
giving a hint that we were friends. As the old scholar talked and questioned, I realised how much I had absorbed from my papa in those quiet days – that, in fact, I understood much of what
the Maestro spoke of. My papa had believed in the practical qualities of things, that certain plants or spices could be used to cure people, but that their powers, their properties, were in turn
influenced by the stars, and that if one knew this, one could shape and control nature itself.

And from my mother I knew other things, vivid in my dreams and as clear and real as my memories of Toledo. Some of them I tried to describe to Maestro Ficino, who listened avidly. I told him a
dream of tall, fair men, beautiful men, their bodies wound all over with strange blue markings, who came in long ships with fires at their prows. The Maestro nodded and scribbled as I spoke of the
northmen, the fire-worshippers. He took a slate and scratched out three triangles, arranged in a larger triangle and asked me if I knew what that was, the mark of a victim to be sacrificed to Odin,
the name of the old Northern god. So I told him of a dream where I had seen these marks, inked on the bodies of men and women who dangled from the trees of a forest where I walked, swaying like
great fruits, so many that they made a forest of their own. I told him that I dreamed of strange shapes, a sort of writing, etched into the palms of these men. I began to understand that he
believed the key to his searches was in the old magic, as he called it, the magic that the northmen had brought with them to Spain, and that this was why I, and my father’s books, were so
precious to him. He spoke of sorcerers, drunk with the power of magic which they called the
seid
. They could cross into the lands of the dead, these conjurors; they could see the future. So
I told him what I believed he wanted to hear, whatever it would take to keep my new place in the palazzo, but I did not speak much of my dreams of wolves, of my mother or of the black man, for
those things seemed too real to me to be consigned to the fond fancies of his notebook.