Bitter Greens (53 page)

‘I’ll try.’ La Strega took the crude cross in one hand. With the other, she scooped up handfuls of the hot ashes and streaked them on her face and arms. ‘I don’t know where I’ll go. I know one thing, I’m free of Venice at last! The witch Sibillia bound me there, you know, bound me against my will.’

‘As you bound me,’ a man’s voice rang out. Magli stepped forward from the shadow of the tower. His voice was as clear and sweet and powerful as a bell. He smiled at the sound of it. ‘Listen to me! I can speak. I can even sing.’ He opened his mouth and began to sing the lullaby Margherita had sung so many times in her lonely prison: ‘
Farfallina, bella e bianca, vola vola.
’ Fly, fly …

‘You sing beautifully,’ Margherita said. All her old fear of this huge man melted away. She thought of the story that Lucio had told her, of the stranger who had helped him when he was wounded. She remembered the huge footprint in the dust and held out one hand to him. He took it and bowed low over it.

‘I used to listen to you sing and long with all my heart to be able to sing like that. You’ve set the music in me free again. I can never repay you!’

‘She bound you too?’ Margherita cast an angry look at La Strega, who rose to her feet.

‘I needed him!’ she cried then flushed and dropped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Come back to Florence with us,’ Lucio said to Magli. ‘I will tell my uncle you saved my life. With a voice like yours, he’ll be glad to give you a place at court.’

‘I must go back to Venice first,’ Margherita said. Lucio looked at her in surprise. ‘My parents … I must find my parents.’

‘Of course! We’ll go back to Venice, find your parents and show them their grandchildren. Maybe we’ll get married there? I’d like to have it settled before I go home. My uncle is kind, but he does rather think he’s in charge of our lives. If we’re married and have your parents’ blessing, and
two fine children already, well, what can he say?’ Lucio grinned at her with his old merry expression, and Margherita was flooded with love for him.

La Strega went west, barefoot and streaked with ashes, carrying nothing but the cross of thorny branches. Magli headed south, taking messages to Florence. Lucio and Margherita headed east to Venice, each carrying a sleeping baby in their arms.

It was a long way, and they were both sick and weary, and, very soon, footsore. A young man gave them a lift in his cart. His name, he told them, was Giambattista Basile, and he was a Neapolitan looking for work in the Venetian Republic.

‘What I’d like to do,’ Giambattista said with a sigh, ‘is write stories, but I guess I’ll have to be a soldier instead.’

‘That seems a shame,’ Lucio said politely. ‘Do you not like fighting?’

Giambattista shuddered. ‘I hate it, but I hate being poor even more. I’m hoping to make my fortune in Venice, and then I can retire and write scurrilous stories. You two look like you have a tale to tell. Will you not share it with me?’

‘You’d never believe it,’ Margherita said with a shaky laugh.

‘Try me,’ Giambattista challenged her.

So she and Lucio told him most of their story, if not all. Some things were too hard to tell. He gasped and scowled and shook his fist in all the right places, and in the end – as they came over the hill and saw Venice floating in a sunset haze on the lagoon – he said, ‘I’d have had it end differently! You should have strangled her with that silver cord, or turned the comb into a wolf to eat her.’

Margherita sighed and shook her head, but Lucio said, ‘Perhaps you’ll be a better soldier than you think, Giambattista.’

He grinned. ‘Ah, well, it’d make a better story, don’t you think?’

Dusk was falling as their gondola drifted through the shadowy canals towards San Polo and the small shop of a mask-maker. Margherita was so exhausted she could barely support the weight of her two hungry babies. Lucio drew her back to lean on him, putting his strong arms under hers, gently cradling his children. Margherita let her head rest on his chest,
feeling the beat of his heart beneath her cheek. ‘I wonder if they’re still there. Maybe they’re dead, or moved away …’

‘We’ll find out soon,’ Lucio said.

Margherita had dreamt of her return so many times. A narrow dark alleyway, a window opening into a treasure trove of strange exotic masks, bright with sequins, nodding with coloured feathers. She would fling open the door and cry, ‘I’m home!’ and her parents would rush to embrace her.

So this is what she did. And though her parents were slow to reach her, their bodies bent and old now, their grief-numbed minds slow to realise their daughter was truly home, when at last their arms encircled her their embrace was as fierce and glad and loving as she had ever imagined it would be.

On 6th October 1600, a grand entertainment was staged in Florence to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV of France and Maria de’ Medici, the younger sister of the Grand Duke, Ferdinando I.

Called simply the ‘
opera
’ (the ‘work’) by its exhausted creator, Jacopo Peri, it was the very newest of entertainments – a combination of music, song, dance and acting. Held at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the idea was to prove to the world how brilliant was the Florence court, and how exceptional its singers, dancers, actors and musicians. Peri had chosen as his theme the story of Orpheus and Euridice but had changed the ending to a happy one so as not to cast a blight on the nuptials. Henry IV of France had already been married by force once, to mad Margot, his wedding precipitating the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. No one wanted a shadow to fall upon his second wedding day.

Margherita was to sing the role of Proserpina, the goddess of spring. It was a mark of huge favour. The only other woman in the cast was Peri’s own daughter, Francesca, who played the title role. All other women in the
opera were played either by castrati or by a single pimply-faced soprano-voiced boy. The castrati were all squeezed into flouncing gowns and tightly curled wigs, the boy tottering on high heels to try to raise him to the same height as everyone else. Magli had flourished so well under Margherita’s tutelage that he had been given the role of La Tragedia. He towered over everyone else on the stage, his lugubrious face painted with a single tear.

Margherita wore her own red-gold hair hanging loose, at the insistence of her husband, Lucio, and was dressed in a gorgeous gown of silvery-green silk embroidered all over with flowers. She stood, her palms damp with perspiration, her stomach fluttering with nerves, in the wings, waiting for her cue. At one point, she peeked around the curtain, smiling to see Lucio sitting in the front row, his twins perched on his knee. Margherita’s parents sat on either side, dressed in their finest, while nearby sat the Grand Duke and his wife, the haughty Christina of Lorraine, the King of France and his new bride, plus countless richly clad noblemen and noblewomen.

Margherita heard the beautiful notes of her introduction. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and stepped out onto the stage, letting her voice soar with the music. Lucio gazed up at her, his dark eyes filled with pride and tender love. She smiled back at him.

Here I am,
she thought,
singing before kings and queens, just like I always dreamt I would do. I can travel the world, see camels and elephants if I want to, visit mountains that touch the sky and oceans that pour over the edge of the world.

I am Margherita.

I am loved.

I am free
.

I was always a great talker and teller of tales.

‘You’ve honey on your tongue,
ma fifille
,’ Maman once said. ‘If you’d lived in earlier times, you could have been a troubadour.’

‘Girls can’t be troubadours,’ Marie said, nose in air.

‘Oh, but they can,’ Maman said. ‘There were some famous troubadours who were women. They were called
trobairitz
and wrote some of the most beautiful poems and songs we know. My mother used to sing me one by the Comtessa de Dia, and I used to sing it to you when you were just a tiny flea. Don’t you remember?’

My sister and I shook our heads.

She sang in her low voice: ‘You give me such joy, enough to make a thousand who weep, merry once more.’

‘I do remember it,’ I said in wonder, hearing a faint sweet echo from my babyhood.

‘Troubadours used to travel from court to court, telling stories and singing songs. They often carried news, which, in dangerous times, they would disguise as fables or fairy tales. Sometimes, they would stay at the court of a king and queen, but other troubadours travelled all over the known world.’

‘That is what I would like to do,’ I said with utter certainty. ‘I’ll be a … what was the word for a girl troubadour again?’

‘
Trobairitz
,’ Maman said. ‘It’s Occitan.’

‘
Trobairitz
,’ I repeated carefully, the word sounding strange on my tongue.

‘There aren’t any troubadours any more, are there, Maman?’ Marie said. ‘And if there were, girls wouldn’t be allowed to be one.’

‘Probably not,’ Maman agreed sadly.

‘I’ll be one anyway,’ I said with determination.

Maman smiled and pulled gently on my hair. ‘I’m sure you will,
ma fifille
, a clever girl like you. You can do whatever you like in this world, if you just have courage enough.’

I lay on my thin hard pallet, looking up at the shadowy arches of stone above me, just rising from the invisibility of night. My eyes smarted with tears, and there was a lump like a bite of unchewed apple in my throat. My life had seemed so open when I was a child, a land of infinite possibilities filled with castles and snow-capped mountains, flower-filled meadows and green valleys, cascading waterfalls and deep hidden gorges where the bones of giants might lie. Now, my life was so grey and narrow. It was bounded by bells and the chanting of prayers and iron-bound doors that were locked three times. I was caged.

I thought of the strange tale that Sœur Seraphina had told me, of the girl locked in a tower without stairs or a door. She had sung, and her song had been heard. It had haunted the distant listener in the forest until he had come and helped her to escape. But I could not sing. Who was there to listen to me in this prison but the other prisoners? And God.

I took a deep breath and pressed my fingers to my wet eyes. When I took my fingertips away, my eyes were dazzled. I blinked and looked up. Above me, a shaft of early sunlight had pierced the narrow mullioned window in the wall behind me. Before I had gone to sleep the night before,
I had shoved the window as wide as I could in the hope of some fresh air and a glimpse of some stars. All I could manage was a few inches, not even enough to slide my hand through. Yet it was wide enough for the rising sun to find a way in, and there, rotating slowly in the shaft of golden light, were three honeybees.

I lay still, feeling an inexplicable shiver pass over my skin, raising the hair on my arms and on the nape of my neck. The bees glowed like jewels, amber banded with jet, wings flashing with diamond fire. Their eyes were huge and dark and shiny. For a moment longer, they hung above my head, humming with life, then one by one they rose and flew away through the window.

To the garden
, I thought. Without a second’s thought, I swung my feet to the floor, caught up my heavy cloak and my sabots and went quietly, barefoot, down the narrow hallway between the canvas curtains. I could hear soft snoring and the rustle of straw as someone rolled over. The stone was so cold underfoot it felt like I was walking on knives.

Through the sleeping convent I crept and found the door into the garden. I paused for a moment, afraid it might be locked, but lifted the latch. It swung open under my touch. I stepped through into the dim hush of dawn. Above the dark walls, the sky was luminous, the palest of blues. The mullioned windows of the dormitory wing glinted with sunshine, and the air smelt delicately of apple blossom and early violets. I breathed deeply, thinking of my mother.
You have honey on your tongue
…

My pulse quickened. I was aware of a deep thrumming in my blood, a subtle trembling in my body from the soles of my feet to the tips of my hair, as if a giant was drumming deep underground. I was both afraid and exalted. Something was happening – I didn’t understand what. The thrumming deepened. Then I saw it, a strange dark cloud, like a storm of blossoms, at the far end of the garden. Bees, hundreds and thousands of them, reeled drunkenly through the air.

I felt at that moment both acutely alive and acutely vulnerable. The bare skin of my arms and face prickled with apprehension; my stomach lurched; my heart sang. For a moment, I hesitated, gazing at that small
living whirlwind, then I turned and ran back into the convent. I knew where Sœur Seraphina’s cell was; I had seen her go in after vespers. I scratched at the door with my smallest fingernail, then, remembering I was not at court, knocked a rapid staccato with my knuckles. It felt oddly liberating. I knocked again.

The door opened and Sœur Seraphina looked out. She was dressed only in her chemise, her cloak wrapped hastily over the top. Her short hair straggled about her face, a pale reddish-blonde colour. She looked at me questioningly.

‘The bees are swarming,’ I whispered.

Her face changed at once. She opened wide her door, stepping back to bend and search for her shoes under her cot. I caught a quick glimpse of her room. A warm rug woven in jewel-like colours lay on the floor, and a thick eiderdown of yellow silk was flung back on the bed. Hanging on the wall was the most extraordinary drawing of a penitent St Mary Magdalene, tear-filled eyes turned to heaven, ripples of thick lustrous hair falling down about her, barely hiding the full ripeness of a bare breast. On the other wall hung a simple wooden cross made of two thorny branches tied together with a tarnished silver ribbon.

Sœur Seraphina caught up her shoes, and then we hurried down the corridor to the garden. ‘I hope I am not too late,’ she whispered as she opened the garden door.

The sky was brighter now, and sunlight gilded the top of the church spire and outlined the brazen buds of the pomegranate tree. The humming was louder; it sounded like a watchman’s rattle, warning of danger.

Sœur Seraphina sprang forward, heading straight towards the dark whirl of bees. I ran after her, feeling again that prickle of apprehension. I’d been stung by a bee as a child, and I well remembered the pain. Sœur Seraphina did not seek to grapple with the swarm, though, but went to the hut and got out some thick gloves, a veiled hat, a long-handled pan with a lid, a tinderbox and a set of small bellows, passing them out to me one by one. I put the hat on hastily, drawing down the veil, and shoved my chilled hands into the gloves. Swiftly, Sœur Seraphina filled the pan with dried
tansy flowers, like fragrant brown buttons, and then used the crumpled brown leaves as tinder, striking a spark from her flint with her steel. Soon, the tansy was alight, and thick grey smoke billowed up from the pan.

‘Put the pan on the wall over there,’ Sœur Seraphina instructed. ‘We must try and stop the bees from crossing it. They do not like the smoke. If they come close to you, use the bellows to puff smoke at them.’

As I obeyed, she hacked at a wormwood shrub with her gardening knife and tore away a long branch, rubbing her hands up and down the stem, bruising the silvery leaves. ‘Bees do not like the smell of wormwood,’ she explained, and rubbed her hands over her bare face and neck. Holding the long wormwood branch in one hand, she then went and found an empty straw skep. Holding the bellows tightly, coughing a little as the fragrant smoke drifted across me, I watched the swarm of bees in utter fascination. They flickered and swirled like a school of glinting minnows, gauzy wings whirring, their mesmerising hum resonating inside my head.

Sœur Seraphina smiled encouragingly at me and gathered up a handful of earth, throwing it under her right foot, chanting:

She then scraped up the earth again and flung it over the swarm of bees, saying in a gentle sing-song:

I stared in wonder and a kind of fear, thinking,
Who is this nun? What heathen magic is this?
Her hair caught the sun, glowing like the embers
of a fire within ash. Her eyes glowed as golden as the bees’ striped bodies. She had flung off the heavy dark cloak, and so was dressed all in white like some ancient pagan goddess, her arms and feet bare.

Carefully, she raised her wormwood branch and gently stroked the edges of the swarm. The bees recoiled from the branch. She swooped the branch back and forth through the air, like a conductor directing a
Te Deum
. The cloud of bees responded like music. Slowly, she directed them down into the straw skep; they obeyed her every gesture and soon were contained within the beehive, all but a few that buzzed about at the entrance, checking all was well before shooting away to begin the job of gathering nectar once more.

‘I am amazed,’ I said and meant it.

She smiled and cast away her wormwood stick. ‘I am glad you woke me. I might have lost them otherwise. How did you know?’

‘I could not sleep,’ I said. ‘Three bees came through my window, buzzing about above me. I thought I’d come out to the garden …’ My voice trailed away. I could not explain the impulse that had led me to follow the bees.

She nodded as if it all made sense. ‘Homer says that the sun-god Apollo was first given the gift of prophecy by three bee-maidens.’

‘How do you know all these things? You don’t talk like a nun at all.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I have lived a very long time, and most of it was not as a nun.’

‘But where did you live? How do you know so many strange and wonderful things?’

She regarded me thoughtfully for a long moment, with eyes as intent and golden as those of a lioness. ‘Have you not yet guessed?’ she asked in her soft foreign accent. ‘I am Selena Leonelli. I was a courtesan in Venice for many, many years. I was muse to the painter Tiziano – he painted that canvas of me that hangs upon my wall – and I was the sorceress who owned the secret walled garden in Venice and grew the bitter green herbs that Margherita’s father stole. It was I who found the tower in the forest, I who bathed in the blood of virgins, I who worked magic by the power of the full moon so that I would keep my beauty forever.’

‘But … but that’s impossible,’ I stammered.

‘Is it? Two hundred odd years I’ve lived, by my reckoning, and slowly, slowly, the spells I wrought are fading away. My hair is grey now, my skin is sagging, my back is bowing under the weight of all those years. And all this time, I have tried to make reparation for the evil I did.’

I could only stare at her. ‘That painting … in your cell … that is you? I mean, you were the model?’

She nodded. ‘Tiziano painted me many, many times.’

‘You were very beautiful.’

‘I was. It’s a long time ago now, so long ago it feels like a dream or a story someone else told me.’

‘How is it that you are permitted to keep the painting? And those other things of yours, the rug and the eiderdown and those fine candlesticks?’