The Scarlet Contessa (11 page)

For the first time, I noticed the pallbearers. One was Brother Domenico and two others his fellow monks. But three of the men were wealthy gentlemen, given their exceedingly fine but unostentatious clothes. The first was small and delicate-looking, with graying red-gold hair; the second was Matteo’s age, young, handsome, dark-haired and muscular. And the third was Lorenzo de’ Medici.

At the sight of Lorenzo, my tenuous grip on my emotions failed. Tears spilled from me, hot and fierce. I remembered Matteo’s suffering on that last horrible night; I thought of how Lorenzo must have waited for him and finally realized that something had gone horribly wrong.

I heard Matteo’s ragged whisper:
Tell Lorenzo . . .

I remember little else of the ceremony—only the sacred Host dry upon my tongue, and the priest circling the coffin twice with more incense, more holy water. Only when it was over, and the pallbearers returned to take the coffin, did I realize that they had been sitting behind me the entire time.

The priest caught my arm and led me after the coffin; as I left the chapel, the tall veiled woman rose and stood respectfully.

We went to a deep hole flanked by a large mound of reddish dirt in the churchyard; the gravediggers were waiting for us, leaning on their shovels. The coffin was set upon ropes, which the diggers used to lower it into the ground. Matteo was laid to rest so that his head lay due east of his feet, since Christ would appear in the eastern sky when He returned to raise the dead.

Lorenzo and the younger man flanked the veiled woman, their arms wound about hers in support; the delicate middle-aged man stood on Lorenzo’s other side and dabbed at his red-rimmed eyes. They remained a short distance from me, as if unwilling to intrude on my grief.

I listened, dazed, as the priest spoke of Saint Martha and her profession of faith that her brother would indeed rise from the dead.

At last, the priest made the sign of the cross over the grave, and chanted:
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei . . .

It was over. At the priest’s prompting, I clutched a fistful of cold, wet soil and sprinkled it onto Matteo’s coffin. The other four mourners watched me, hesitant. I turned to them, gesturing at the mound of earth.

“Please,” I said.

The woman was first to add her handful of dirt; the men followed. Once I had handed a coin to the priest for his services, and a purse for the monastery from Bona to Brother Domenico, the gravediggers took to their work with haste. I turned to the others.

“Ser Lorenzo,” I asked, “may I have a private word with you?”

He nodded, and moved to my side; the others retreated a few steps, while Lorenzo led me over to a bare-limbed tree, swollen with pink-red bud in response to the unusually mild weather. I tried not to flinch each time a clod of earth struck Matteo’s coffin.

“I was so sorry to hear of Matteo’s death,” Lorenzo said. For once, his glorious confidence and equanimity were gone, his strong shoulders slumped by sorrow. “We learned of it from the abbot less than a week ago.” A rock struck the pine coffin resoundingly; he looked over his shoulders toward the gravediggers and turned back to me. “When did it happen? Was he ill?”

“The night after you left Milan,” I answered. “Ser Lorenzo, he was poisoned.” I struggled to keep my voice steady, but it broke on the last word.

He drew in a deep breath and turned his face away, though not before I glimpsed his guilt and pain. For a long moment, he stood speechless, staring at distant church spires; when he was able to look back at me, he whispered, “I am so sorry.”

“As he was dying, he gave me a message for your ears alone,” I told him. “He said, ‘Tell Lorenzo: The Wolf and Romulus mean to destroy you.’ I would have given you this sooner, but I did not trust putting it on paper. Matteo asked me to bring him here, to San Marco, and I tried to come immediately, but the duke would not give me leave.”

He gazed past me at the far distance and clenched his jaw, the lower jutting a finger’s breadth beyond the upper; a muscle in his cheek twitched. “I had expected as much,” he said softly. “And I apologize, Madonna, for involving you in such sordid matters.”

“But who is the Wolf? And who Romulus?” I tried, and failed, to hide the hatred, the bitterness, in my tone.

He heard it and though his expression never flickered, something in him recoiled from it. “You must trust me, Madonna, that Matteo did not die in vain. Those who are guilty will be brought to justice in due time. But I would be remiss in my responsibility to Matteo if I told you. It would place you in great danger and would only increase your suffering.”

“Then he
was
murdered!” I let go a bitter, gulping sob. “And you know who has killed him—and will not tell me!”

He gave me a moment to collect myself, and asked, very quietly: “Madonna, did you trust Matteo?”

“Of course!” I snapped.

“Of all the people in the world, he sent you to me. He sent you here, to San Marco. Did he tell you that we Medici are the benefactors of this church and monastery? My grandfather Cosimo rebuilt it from a crumbling pile of bricks. He spent much time here in his last years, meditating in one of the cells. Nothing happens at San Marco without our notice.

“Matteo sent you here because he trusted me most of all. Will you not trust me, too, Madonna Dea? We Medici were the closest thing Matteo had to family . . . and I tell you that in the strictest confidence, just as Matteo entrusted his warning for me with you.”

By then, my tears were no longer so angry; when Lorenzo stretched out his hand, I took it.

“Come,” he soothed. “Come and meet our family, and our dearest friend, who loved Matteo greatly.”

He led me over to the group of mourners: the dark-veiled woman, the handsome young man, and the small, frail-looking older gentleman with silvering red hair.

“This is Madonna Dea, Matteo’s wife,” Lorenzo told them. He emphasized the last word, pausing as he did so to shoot the other two men a peculiar warning glance. As they nodded a solemn greeting, the woman faced me and lifted her veil.

She was silver-haired and elegant of bearing, with very large, heavy-lidded eyes and a sharp chin; she might have been lovely had it not been for her astonishing nose, which veered forth from a flattened bridge to curve alarmingly to one side. Like the cedar in the convent garden, her face was hauntingly familiar.

“My dear,” she said kindly; like Lorenzo’s, her voice was reedy and nasal, yet her tone was so well modulated and gracious that the sound was not as grating as it might have been. “I am Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother to Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici.” She gestured at her sons as she spoke, then at the small middle-aged man. “And this is our dear friend, Marsilio.”

“Marsilio Ficino,” the man said; his voice was hoarse from weeping. “I knew Matteo for some years, and kept up a correspondence with him. Did he ever speak of me?”

I thought of the translation of Iamblichus, and the letter written at the end of the manuscript. “I know the name,” I answered, “but nothing more.”

Madonna Lucrezia stepped forward and took my hand. Hers were cold and bony, but her eyes and voice drew me like a hearth in winter. “We have known Matteo since he was a boy. We made a little feast, for us alone, in Matteo’s honor; would you do us the kindness of joining us?”

My driver followed their carriage to the rusticated stone palazzo on the Via Larga. Giuliano—the younger brother, with his mother’s lean, handsome face and large eyes, though, fortunately, not her nose—helped me from the wagon while Lorenzo tended to his mother. There was a sweet timidity in Giuliano that his older brother lacked; Giuliano averted his eyes and said nothing while we waited for Lorenzo and Lucrezia to join us.

Lucrezia led the way through the ground-floor loggia, where a pair of bankers sat at a long table, writing up loan agreements for eager clients. We exited onto a large colonnaded courtyard; in its center was a burbling fountain at the feet of a life-sized bronze Judith, grasping Holofernes by his hair as she grimly prepared to hack off his head with a sword. Nearby, a bronze, naked David smirked as he rested one foot atop Goliath’s severed head.

We made our way inside and up to the second floor, crossing over shining, inlaid marble floors and passing displays of crumbling marble busts, ancient armor and tasseled, jewel-encrusted scimitars, thread-of-gold tapestries, and painting after painting after painting in gilded frames. We arrived finally at an intimate dining room, where I was encouraged to sit close to the fire, and servants—not courtiers in finery, but common folk, plainly dressed—brought wine and bread and pasta in broth for the first course. It was nothing like the court of Milan; for one thing, the diners were cordial and entirely relaxed with one another; for another, they addressed those waiting on us as though they were part of the family, and inquired after their well-being and loved ones. The servants, too, were relaxed, and though courteous, did not bother with bows and curtsies.

“I am so glad that you have come, Madonna,” Lucrezia said, smiling faintly across the table at me. Lorenzo sat beside her; Giuliano and Marsilio, on either side of me. “Lorenzo says that he made your acquaintance in Pavia.” She paused to stare down at her steaming bowl; her gaze turned inward for an instant as she contemplated her words. “We were heartbroken when we heard of Matteo’s passing,” she added finally. “Tell me, did he ever speak of us to you?”

“No,” I answered awkwardly. “Well, that is, I knew that he was friends with Ser Lorenzo.”

“My late husband, Piero, saw to Matteo’s education,” Lucrezia responded. “Marsilio here was his teacher.” She took up her spoon, the signal for the rest of us to begin eating.

Marsilio let go a sad, small sigh; his pale eyes were bright with affection. He was more emotional than the others, quicker to gesture, to smile, to weep, with a dreamy distraction in his gaze that marked artists and scholars.

“A gentler, kinder lad never lived,” Marsilio said. “Nor a quicker one. He took to Greek and Latin as if he had been born knowing them; of course, he already had his French.” He colored suddenly, as though realizing he had said too much.

I ventured the truth. “I have read the manuscript you gave Matteo, the one by Iamblichus. When my husband was dying, he told me where to find his hidden papers. I found Iamblichus, and three rituals—”

“We will speak of that, and many other things,” Lucrezia said swiftly, pointedly, “after we have dined. There is much to discuss in private. But for now, let us speak of Matteo’s youth.”

And she proceeded to tell me how one day an eleven-year-old boy came to scrub the floor of old Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell at San Marco. Cosimo had left him to his work, and returned to find the boy absorbed in reading a manuscript in Latin: one of Plato’s works, recently translated for Cosimo by his grandsons’ tutor, Marsilio Ficino. The boy apologized profusely for abandoning his scrubbing and for touching the manuscript. But when Cosimo asked him a few questions about what he had read, the boy responded with such intelligence that Cosimo was deeply impressed. He went to the abbot, and learned the boy was orphaned; his mother had died the year before, and he claimed to know nothing of his father.

“And so,” Lucrezia said, “with Cosimo’s blessing, my husband, Piero, took charge of the boy’s education. Though he lived at San Marco with the monks, we often brought him here to play with the boys and take lessons from Marsilio. On holidays, we brought him here so that he could celebrate them with a family. And when he grew older, Piero sent him to the University of Pavia.

“Lorenzo here often visited Duke Galeazzo—God rest his soul—in order to maintain good relations with Milan. While he was there on business on his father’s behalf, he learned that the duke’s secretary was looking for a good apprentice. And so we recommended Matteo to him.”

Next to me, Giuliano half turned, smiling. His eyes held an exuberance that his brother’s lacked; his full lips were framed by fetching dimples. “He used to go with us to the Epiphany celebrations. He was my age, and he and Lorenzo and I would walk together behind the horses.”

“Not too closely, and even then with great care where we stepped,” Lorenzo observed drily, and Giuliano responded with a short laugh before continuing.

“Epiphany is tomorrow,” Giuliano said. “There will be a street procession from the House of Lords all the way to San Marco; Lorenzo will be on horseback dressed as Balthazar, one of the three Wise Men. Two other notable men have been selected to play magi, and I will be riding in Lorenzo’s entourage. It’s quite a beautiful old pageant. We were hoping that you might take part in it this year, and join us afterward for the feast.”

He spoke with such warmth, such poignance, that I was moved, yet grief left me unwilling to countenance anything so festive. My eyes burned, and as they filled, Giuliano saw and took my hand in brotherly fashion.

“Oh, dear Madonna Dea,” he said, genuinely stricken. “I did not mean to make you cry.” He cast about for something to cheer me, and said, “Perhaps I should now tell you how Matteo used to carry a slingshot, and one year struck the rump of one of the Wise Men’s mounts with a stone. The poor horse reared and sent the crowd scattering; it was a miracle the rider held on.”

I managed a small smile, which satisfied him. Meanwhile, his mother said, “Don’t press her, Giuliano. Madonna Dea is in mourning and may well wish to forgo the procession.”

“Please,” I said to them both, overwhelmed by the affection with which they spoke of Matteo and showed toward me. “Please call me Dea.”

“Dea, then,” Lorenzo said with authority, as if establishing it for all. “Matteo has entrusted you with a great deal, Dea. He wrote to us of you.” He gave his mother a knowing look; Lucrezia responded with a nod, then spoke to the servants.

“Matilda, Agnes,” she said, “and Donato, would you excuse us? We will summon you when we are ready for the next course.”

The servants quietly took their leave. Once the great door was shut, and we four were alone, Lorenzo said softly, “Epiphany is very important to us Medici. Seven generations ago”—his voice took on a storyteller’s rhythm, as though he uttered a speech often rehearsed—“my family was entrusted with a great deal of oral wisdom—knowledge that was at once both a great privilege and a great burden—by a wise man of Egypt who called himself Baldazar. It was nothing less than the spiritual tradition of the ancients, and was later confirmed in writing by several sacred texts which my grandfather Cosimo was blessed to discover.”