The Malice of Fortune (6 page)

The pope had secured our lodgings at the Palazzo Machirelli. This was a new building, only a few streets up from the Rocca, the immense stone fortress that anchors the southwest corner of the city. My two small rooms were upstairs, barren save for a big walnut chair and a bed with feather-stuffed covers. Camilla threw open the shutters, allowing us to look out over a lovely courtyard of the most modern
all’antica
design, with slender columns and graceful arches.

We spent the next few days unpacking our chests, determining what to buy, and with great effort securing charcoal, wine, bread, and cheese, as everything is scarce here. With the days too cold to open the shutters more than a crack, we saw little of our neighbors. Even so, Camilla and I made a game of spying on them, just as we had when our windows overlooked the Via dei Banchi, in those years before Juan was murdered. Whenever we heard steps crunching in the frozen sand, we peeked out and gossiped about men we did not know.

“Merchant. Venetian,” Camilla said of a graying gentleman wearing a sable cap, with sable lapels on his
cioppa
.

“You are correct about the attire,” I said, “but a Venetian of his years would dye his hair, and this man has a little stoop from sitting too much—a scholar’s stoop. Ambassador. Ferrara or Mantua.”

“Poor fellow,” Camilla said sadly of a much younger man, who
retrieved a mule from the stables and proceeded to pace it dutifully around the courtyard, wearing only thin hose and a short jacket so threadbare that a louse would have slid off.

“Look at his hair,” I said with less sympathy, “tossed helter-skelter atop his head like a spring salad. Messer Salad-head. But he is not a manservant. Do you see the ink on his fingers? An ambassador’s clerk. And mule keeper. Florentine. They are a republic now. And republics don’t pay to dress their clerks.”

Having finished his circuits, the mule keeper began to feed the beast hay out of his hand, as if it were his child. He was engaged in this communion when a boy of perhaps twelve, attired in a peasant’s horsehair cape, with bare legs and shoes that might have been carved from gourds, entered through the stables and went at once to him. The two spoke briefly, whereupon the mule keeper plucked from his threadbare jacket a silver coin, which his visitor snatched eagerly before running out the way he had come.

“Madonna?” Camilla said.

I clutched her hand but said nothing.

On the third day after our arrival in Imola, I still had heard nothing from the pope. That morning, when Camilla went out to secure our necessities, she had found the Imolese similarly uncertain of their own fates. “They tell me that Vitellozzo Vitelli took Fossombrone on All Saints’ Day,” Camilla reported, this being more than a month past and Fossombrone a fortress of considerable importance, though some distance south of here. “They say Valentino’s garrison was slaughtered to a man. But since then, Madonna, it is the living truth that no one has heard a thing, though they all fear that the
condottieri
will soon march on Imola, and put this city under siege.”

I could presume that Vitellozzo Vitelli’s attack on Fossombrone was one of the traitorous acts His Holiness had reported to me in the Hall of Saints, the
condottieri
having wrested from Valentino’s loyal troops a fortress they had no doubt assisted the duke in securing only months previously. And like the Imolese, I could only guess what progress the rebel
condottieri
had achieved since then, an uncertainty
that made the pope’s silence all the more unsettling. I peered anxiously through the shutters, almost expecting to find the invaders in the courtyard.

Having no other occupation, I continued my vigil at the window, after a while observing the mule keeper begin his circuits, just as he had the previous day. But several times when he was opposite our rooms, he glanced up, as if he knew we were watching him.

“Do you think we are spying on the pope’s spy?” I asked Camilla. “Perhaps His Holiness has withheld his ‘instruction’ because he expects that some accomplice will call on me, thus establishing my guilt.” I caught myself gnawing at my lower lip. “Darling, go down there and get his accent and try to make some sense of him. But don’t provide him any of our particulars. See what he is willing to give up.”

Upon exiting our stairwell, Camilla stopped the mule keeper just after he had passed beneath our window; he was not much taller than she was and nearly as lithe. When she spoke, his dark eyes shined at her and his thin lips drew a smile across his narrow face. I was scarcely surprised that he found her agreeable; for her part, Camilla tilted her head in a fashion she has, as he replied to her with lively gestures.

After a little while Camilla came back up, saying, “You were correct in believing he is Florentine, and a learned man—he speaks well-lettered Tuscan. He had a thousand questions about us, but I did not offer him anything, even when he gave me his name. Messer Niccolò. He thinks you are here to do business. Or so he implies.” She shook her head. “Madonna, on my oath I don’t think he knows enough about you to be the pope’s spy.”

Here Camilla’s smile, which never remained long, fled her face. “But he told me something you will want to know. He wondered if we are staying in because of the murder ten days after All Saints’. When I asked what he was talking about, he said the peasants are still chattering about it, full of rumors of every sort. Madonna, this woman was … cut … She was cut into quarters.” Camilla’s eyes were wide. “And these pieces of her were scattered about the countryside. But her head has never been found.”

“Ten days after All Saints’,” I said numbly, trying to escape the pictures in my mind. “That would be three weeks ago. Sufficient time for
the pope to have been informed, to have dispatched me on this errand, and for us to arrive here. God’s Cross. She has to be the same woman who had Juan’s amulet in her charm bag.”

I closed my eyes, to no avail, because the images were still waiting for me in the darkness. Perhaps there had been reason to take off this woman’s head. But what purpose had been served by butchering her like an ox at a Saturday market?

This grim revelation led me to a more urgent question. “Why did His Holiness say nothing about the manner of her … perishing, when it seems to be common knowledge here? He did not say she had been dismembered. He merely told me she had been found in a field.” I peeked down into the courtyard. The Florentine had resumed his rounds. After a moment he glanced up, prompting me to step back. “ ‘The corners of the winds.’ Perhaps her murderers were boasting that they had scattered her to the winds. Just as they left Juan’s amulet in the same charm bag, to boast that they had also murdered him. But I cannot imagine why His Holiness did not remark on this connection.”

“Madonna. Do you think His Holiness wanted to see if you already knew that connection?”

I smiled, but only because Camilla was so clever. “Perhaps His Holiness believes these corners of the winds are the key to all of this, more so even than Juan’s amulet. And perhaps, as you say, he wondered if I already knew. Or does he believe I will discover their meaning for him? But unless the corners of the winds are in these rooms … What is His Holiness waiting on? For the
condottieri
and their armies to appear at the gates of Imola?”

The Florentine’s young friend arrived, in the same fashion as the previous day. “You are most likely correct in assuming that your Messer Niccolò is not spying upon us, at least on the pope’s behalf,” I said, watching as the messenger received his stipend and exited. “Nonetheless, this boy is apprising him of something.”

Camilla, who by earliest habit always looked for some way to be useful—an instinct without which she would not have survived her childhood—had begun to polish our little copper bathtub with a handful of sand from the courtyard. She did not look up as she asked, “Do you think they are watching for the
condottieri
?”

I did not think so. But I said nothing. Instead, from deep in my memory I heard my mother’s voice:
Cercar Maria per Ravenna
. A saying she had taught me when I was just a girl: To search for Maria in Ravenna. If you don’t know, it comes from a story about a man who journeys to Ravenna, frantically pursuing a mysterious woman named Maria, with whom he is desperately in love. This man finds the object of his quest, only to uncover a most unpleasant secret about her that proves to be the death of him. So the saying is a warning—be careful of the truth you seek.

I watched Messer Niccolò lead his animal back into the stables. But far more clearly, I could still see the pope standing before me in the Hall of Saints, doubt twitching across his face. And now I saw a deeper fear.

As Camilla scoured the copper, the wet sand screeched slightly. My whisper was so faint that she could not hear me. “That is what frightens you, isn’t it, Your Holiness? That we will arrive at these corners of the winds, only to find Maria in Ravenna.”

On our fourth day in Imola, once again we observed Messer Niccolò’s ritual and the arrival of his informant. An hour after the latter departed, we had a knock on our door, the first of our entire stay in this city. I looked at Camilla and said with false cheer, “You see, His Holiness has not forgotten me.”

Camilla had already gone to the door. “Shall I open up?”

I nodded, my nerves raw.

From our bedroom, I could see our caller on the threshold. This youth was nearly as smooth-faced and ruddy as the mule-keeper’s boy, but attired at considerably greater expense, in the vermilion and yellow hose and matching jacket of Duke Valentino’s household. At once he presented Camilla a little card, dipped gracefully to his knee, and left us.

Camilla frowned as if the missive had been wrongly addressed. “Madonna, this is not from His Holiness. His Excellency Duke Valentino has summoned you to the Rocca this evening. To
‘Cena nel Paradiso.’
 ”

Supper in Paradise. I did not know what Valentino meant by those words; they seemed little more than another riddle, much like his father’s. I could not even guess if Valentino had summoned me on the pope’s behalf or for his own reasons. But perhaps he knew that a thousand memories would rise around me regardless, like a field of lavender springing up from bare soil, the perfume almost suffocating. For a moment I felt that I could not breathe.

When I could speak, I said to Camilla, “We’ll have to wash my hair.”

III

The brief afternoon was nearing its end when I put on the gown I had kept in my traveling chest, folded beneath a layer of dried rose petals. This was a
camora
of exquisite loveliness and great value, the cloth a
cremisi velluto
of the deepest red I have ever seen, brocaded with gold-and-silver threads standing in relief against the sheared velvet. At my throat I wore a very rare Roman cameo—carved in sardonyx, the portrait was a young woman or perhaps the goddess Luna—on a string of Venetian pearls; my hair was braided in back in the
coazzone
fashion, my hairnet woven of gold threads.

Camilla had brought along a mirror I obtained in better times, which I now despise, because the quicksilvered glass reveals even the smallest flaw. I swear by the seven churches I had not looked into this glass of truth since the week Juan was murdered, back when my hair was blond. “God’s Cross,” I said, “who is she?” After five years of dyeing I still did not think of myself as sable-haired. And of course I no longer looked anything like a girl, though perhaps neither did I the last time I appraised myself in that mirror. But the shape of my face had not changed: still the pale forehead, too broad, and long nose, which I have always regarded as too humped; the delicate mouth, too small and puckered; and the chin too narrow. “You know what my mentor, Gambiera, told me the first time she dressed me up to do business?” I said to Camilla. “ ‘You look like one of those bird masks ladies wear at Carnival.’ ”

“I think she also said you were a very gorgeous bird,” Camilla told
me, still fussing with my hairnet. “A ravishing golden songbird. Or so you told me one night when you had too much Vernaccia.”