Maisie didn’t answer. She just stood there all dreamy-eyed.
Felix elbowed her in the ribs.
“Hey!” he said. “What do you want to do?”
She took another peek back at the building where, inside, Sandro made his paintbrushes, then sighed and shrugged.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Fine,” Felix said.
He pointed toward the bridge.
“Let’s go that way, then.”
Men had begun to fill the streets, walking in groups of three or more, heads bent together as if in very important discussion. Some of them stared at Felix and Maisie as they passed, whether because of their unusual clothing or the fact that there seemed to be no children out and about, Felix couldn’t tell. But remembering his horrible time in the workhouse, and then in that terrible chimney, he worried that maybe they shouldn’t be out on the street at all. But where could they take shelter?
Oblivious, Maisie stopped to watch as some men set up tables right on the street. They placed impressive boxes on top, and when they unlocked the boxes Maisie saw that they were full of money.
“Are they selling something?” she wondered out loud. But they had no goods to sell. “Or maybe giving money away?”
Felix touched her arm.
“Look,” he said as a man began to count his money.
There, stamped right on the money, was the giglio.
“What are you children doing here?” the man asked gruffly.
He was a portly man with a big black mustache and the kind of eyebrows that look like one long caterpillar stretching over his heavy lidded eyes.
“Uh . . . um . . . ,” Felix stammered, suddenly afraid they weren’t supposed to be there.
“Go back home where you belong,” the man barked. “Or I’ll feed you both to the lions.”
With a sinister laugh, he gestured behind Maisie and Felix and then returned to arranging his money on the table.
Slowly, Maisie and Felix turned around.
There, across the small piazza, two lions paced in an ornate cage.
“Lions?” Felix managed to gasp. “Again?”
“At least these lions are locked up,” Maisie pointed out.
“Still . . . ,” Felix muttered.
“I don’t think they really feed children to them,” Maisie said.
Felix glanced at the man as he peered from beneath his unibrow.
“I’m not so sure,” Felix said.
Maisie slapped his arm playfully.
“Come on,” she said, not waiting for him but instead forging ahead. “Let’s see what’s down by the river.”
Felix glanced at the lions again, a slow shiver spreading up his arms.
No problem, he said to himself.
Maisie and Felix happily wandered along the Arno River for the rest of the day. They stopped to study the goldsmiths and furniture-makers working in their shop windows, unaware of the children staring in at them. Each craftsman worked in an area filled with others doing the same work: all the goldsmiths were grouped together, all the furniture-makers. And then the feather merchants and candle-makers.
The day passed pleasantly, Maisie and Felix transfixed by the way the men shaped table legs from wood, or put fire to soft gold, or dipped the wicks into enormous pots of melted white wax to make pillar candles. A candle-maker leaving his shop offered them some bread and a chunk of smelly cheese, which they accepted readily, although Felix skipped the cheese.
As they approached the Ponte Vecchio, the harsh metallic smell of blood filled their noses. That bridge, they soon saw, was where the butchers set up shop. All kinds of raw meat hung from hooks and dripped blood in puddles along the bridge. Innards hung there, too, disgusting trails of intestines and organs that made Felix have to look away. Maisie poked him in the ribs and he glanced up just in time to see a pig’s head grinning at them.
“Gross!” he said, focusing on his feet again and trying to avoid the oozing blood.
It seemed to take forever, but finally they were across the Ponte Vecchio and away from the meat and the butchers in their blood-splattered smocks.
A bell rang, low and mournful, marking the time.
“Does that sound like a cow to you?” Maisie said hopefully.
“Maybe,” Felix said, remembering that they were getting to meet with that pompous Sandro Botticelli.
The bell rang again, Maisie carefully counting to check the time.
“That’s definitely the one,” she said. “Let’s hurry!”
They moved through the thick crowd of Florentines out for an evening stroll, making their way to the Piazza della Signoria.
There, Maisie stood right in the center, scanning the people’s faces for Sandro’s, while Felix sulked beside her. “Let’s hurry to the bridge!” Maisie shouted.
“He’s probably not even coming,” he finally said, relieved. “What a jerk.”
“Who exactly is a jerk?” someone asked, his voice mocking.
Felix looked up, straight at Sandro standing before them. “No one,” Felix said, shuffling his feet awkwardly.
“Ah!” Sandro said. “All right, then.”
He linked his arm through Maisie’s.
“Shall we stroll?” he asked.