At last, Felix and Leonardo also joined the procession. Of course Maisie hadn’t waited for him. Again, Felix thought in frustration. But he didn’t want his sister to ruin the day, so he accepted the noisemaker someone thrust in his hand and shook up and down, adding to the cacophony.
Like a giant serpent, the procession snaked through the narrow streets until it reached the Arno River. There, it followed the curve of the river. Voices from a float covered in fresh lilies—the flower of Florence, Leonardo explained—called out to Leonardo and Felix.
“Join us!”
Leonardo grinned. “There’s your sister and Sandro Botticelli.”
Felix was about to protest, but Leonardo left the line to race toward them. Felix followed, reluctantly.
But once on the float, able to look down at the procession and across the river to the rooftops and hills of Florence, he was happy he had come.
Maisie, however, was scowling at him.
“You never showed up!” she said.
“You left me!” he reminded her. “And a priest grabbed me and—”
“Why can’t you just stick by my side?”
“Why can’t you stick by my side?”
They glared at each other.
“I don’t understand you anymore,” they both said at almost the exact same time.
“Ah!” Leonardo told them. “That is a problem. You must try harder to listen to each other. To understand each other’s point of view.”
Maisie shot him an angry look. “You have no idea all the things we are supposed to understand that don’t make sense. Why our parents aren’t together. Why our mother is with a dope named Bruce Fishbaum. Why—”
“Maisie,” Leonardo said, interrupting. “And Felix, too. The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
Leonardo’s words settled in Felix’s mind.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Felix looked at Maisie, who was looking right back at him.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo had just given them the lesson they most needed to hear. But they were still on the float, the smell of lilies all around them, moving along the Arno River in Renaissance Florence.
“Why are we still here?” Felix whispered to her.
Maisie avoided his gaze.
“Maisie?”
“We haven’t given him the seal,” she muttered.
“That’s right!” Felix said. “I think it’s time, don’t you?”
Maisie didn’t answer.
“I don’t have it,” Felix reminded her.
Maisie turned toward him.
“Neither do I,” she said.
CHAPTER 13
AMY PICKWORTH’S MESSAGE
“You did what?” Felix gasped.
The procession had ended, and Maisie and Felix were heading with a large group to the Palazzo Medici for a banquet.
“It’s no big deal,” Maisie said. “I put it in one of those big urns. We’ll get it as soon as we arrive.”
“What if it’s not there?”
“Why do you have to worry so much?” Maisie asked, rhetorically.
“Why can’t you just do what you’re supposed to do?”
“Maybe I didn’t want to go back to Bruce Fishbaum, and Dad in a hotel, and everything upside down!” Maisie blurted.
“I don’t understand why you can’t accept . . .”
Felix stopped himself, Leonardo’s words ringing in his ears.
He took a deep breath.
“I don’t like Bruce Fishbaum much, either,” he told Maisie. “But Mom does.”
After all, Felix realized, they had to try to understand her as well.
“How can she?” Maisie said.
“It’s an adult thing, I think,” he admitted.
“I thought after Agatha called off the wedding that Mom would see the chance to reunite with Dad.”
“I guess they don’t want to get back together, Maisie. And I guess we have to understand that.”
Tears sprang to Maisie’s eyes.
“So you think they’re divorced forever?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Well,” Maisie said, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand, “I don’t have to like it.”
Felix smiled at her. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”
Together they walked through the front doors of the Palazzo Medici and into the courtyard.
The banquet table was practically drooping from the platters of meat and pasta and vegetables, the jugs of wine, the cheeses and fruits.
But Maisie led Felix away from the table, across the courtyard toward the terra-cotta urn.
Abruptly, she stopped.
“What now?” he asked her.
“The urn was right over there,” Maisie said, pointing to an empty corner.
“Oh no,” Felix groaned.
Maisie’s gaze flitted from one corner to the next until she’d determined that the urn was indeed gone.
Clarice appeared in front of them, a quizzical expression on her face.
“There’s food, and soon Leonardo will sing a song he wrote especially for Carnival,” she said.
“Thanks,” Felix remembered to say, despite his growing anxiety. Without that urn, the seal was missing. And without that seal, they would never go back home to Newport and their parents.