The Botticelli Secret

30
In the next few months I grew a mask too—I was given the veneer of nobility but my insides were frozen with misery; I had everything and I had nothing. I was pampered and preened and gentrified, yet I was unhappier than I had ever been.
I spent my mornings a caged bird—in the beautiful apartments of the doge inside the white snow palace of the Palazzo Ducale. I never forgot that I was a prisoner—for I was soon assigned a guard. A plain woman named Marta was sent to attend me. She was a sullen creature with a small hairy wart riding her lip and eyes that looked in different directions but nevertheless both seemed to be watching me. The wench was introduced to me as my lady’s maid and certainly she did as I bid her, albeit with a grudging, sulky air that made me itch to slap her. I would have been within my rights to beat my servant, but I dared not, for lady’s maid she may have been though in truth she was my jailer and we both knew it. I had no doubt that every detail of my behavior reached the open ears of my mother.
My days proceeded, each one, thus in a regimen of sameness: in the mid-morning I was bathed and combed and scrubbed daily by a gaggle of attendants. I was dressed in the richest cloths of green or gold or sapphire or ruby—silks and satins from the East and velvets and taffetas from the North. These glowing colors were always covered with a long black surcoat, to accentuate the whiteness of my noble skin. This coat gave me no comfort, for it was as thin as parchment, and the palace whistled with draft; I shivered from dawn till dusk. I was made up as was fitting for a young noblewoman, with wine must and red ocher to give blush to my pale cheeks, charcoal pencil to line my eyes, and pulverized malachite to color my eyelids. I was not used to such artifice. Of course, we whores had our tricks and I had been known, on feast days back in Florence, to use oxblood to color my lips and cheeks, but for the most part I left such things alone. I wondered how much my mother depended on such arts for her youthful perfection.
My hair was dressed by a Moorish girl named Yassermin, who spoke no Tuscan but knew how to curry my hair all right—her black fingers fairly flew as she braided, pinning priceless gems in my locks which cost more to buy than she did. After all this elaborate dressing, my hair was then covered with a black veil called a zendado—a light drape of black silk, attached to my hair with a small golden crown, designed to keep my skin pale. Golden bracelets were loaded onto my arms and a gold-handled fan of white feathers dangled from my wrist. The bells rang four quarters before I was even dressed.
I was brought my breakfast in my chamber on a silver dish and would dolefully eat while staring out of my window onto the lagoon, watching the curracles and spiceboats and wishing I were traveling far like they. Then I was taken to one of the fresco-clad presence chambers—a great room with sea charts and maps covering every wall—for my schooling. A procession of tutors came to me so that I might learn the business of being noble.
A stern Dominican monk, Fra Girolamo, taught me to read. I worked hard at his lessons, not for fear of his dour person but for a vow I had taken in the herbarium of Santa Croce that I would never again be graveled by the lack of letters (besides, I had plans of my own, which would rely upon this art—more of this later). A Flemish goodwife taught me needlepoint—daily I pricked my poor fingers and flung my frame across the room, much to the mouselike dame’s shock. A young and fancy Frenchman, Signor Albert, taught me how to dance the latest pavanes from the Continent, and this I enjoyed the most. I was privately surprised that my mother, in her determination to re-create my history, would leave me unchaperoned with the dancing master, who was frisky as a marionette and sleek as an otter, but soon realized he was as much of a finocchio as my dear intended. In fact, the only person that might have been a threat to my chastity was Signor Cristoforo, a young Genoese who had been engaged to teach me map reading, seacraft, and all the maritime arts that one could learn without going aboard ship. “Essential,” my mother said, for a young noblewoman from Venice to know all this, for the city, and indeed my father’s wealth, was built on the seafaring trade. Now, I knew naught of the Genoese as a people, but if all that city’s citizens were as ugly as Signor Cristoforo, I was in no hurry to see the place. I remembered then, of course, that there was a time once when I may have gone there, with he who filled my thoughts and preoccupied my mind, for all my waking and sleeping hours, as the conclusion to a quest that now seemed as far away as fairy tale.
In the afternoons I would sometimes walk out into the city with my retinue, or take a gondola (for now I had learned the name of the blade-shaped boats), or even the doge’s personal craft, the Bucintoro. This last was a fantastical ship straight from the tales of fable, a great golden barge with a figurehead of gold and gilded waves and curlicues skirting the helm. I always felt uncomfortable in this floating crown, for there was no question of being able to travel about the city quietly—everywhere we went the vessel announced my presence and the people of Venice goggled to see the dogaressa’s daughter, back from her convent education to prepare for marriage. On my afternoon excursions my mother would always accompany me, talking constantly, but always of the city, never of us. I heard one phrase again and again—”Stato del Mar,”
“Stato del Mar.” The phrase was forever on the dame’s lips, a musical phrase washing in and out upon her breath like the tide itself. She wanted me, it seemed, above all to grasp the concept of Venice as a State of the Sea, and to know that the sea gave everything to the city. We went everywhere in the city together, dressed almost alike in our fine gowns, cloaks of coney to keep out the freezing winds, and chopines, shoes built up from the sole to elevate the feet above the inevitable floodwaters. All that separated us was my mother’s gold mask. I learned that she had above a hundred masks in her chamber, made by the finest craftsmen in Venice. All different, but all gold, and all depicting the face of a lioness, with no mane. Though many of the citizens went about masked in the winter, I never saw another lioness and I wondered if it was my mother’s special privilege. The She-lion, rampant, showed me her city.
She taught me first of our home, the Palazzo Ducale. I half listened to her description of this center of government, of the privileges and restrictions due to the doge for his short term of office, an office strictly rotated to deter corruption. Instead, I looked up at the white lace palace and was interested to note that when you took a closer look, the brickwork was not white but patterned with ornate diamonds of pale rose, inset with sapphire blue. Studded as if with the looted jewels on which the Stato del Mar was built. Like everything in Venice, if you look closer, nothing is as it seems. My gaze continued upward. Set in the middle of the loggia were two pillars that differed in color from their snowy neighbors, like wine-darkened teeth after a glass of good red. My mother followed my eye and explained that these twin pillars had been stained with years of blood as traitors to the republic were drawn and quartered between them. I understood her well, and the whisper of a threat built into such a beautiful fa?ade.
Obediently I learned the names of the sestieri, or “sixths,” that divided the city and repeated them as a child does her catechism—San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio, Dorsodoro, San Polo, and painfully, Santa Croce, a district named after a demolished church that shared the name of Brother Guido’s former home. In a few short weeks I began to know every calle, or canal, every palace on the Grand Canal, the great S-shaped waterway that cleaved through the city.
S for Serenissima, S for Stato del Mar, said my mother.
S for She-lion, thought I.
At each great house I had to name its owners and their antecedents, following their families back to the Crusades, learning by rote as my mother instructed me. I knew every church spire and every bell that gave tongue. I could name the boats that crowded the mouth of the canal, their wares and whence they hailed from. I learned of trade routes as we visited the Arsenale and watched the ships under construction, each with a proud lion poised on the prow. My mother talked endlessly, as if she perversely enjoyed my company. As if she were cramming sixteen years of lost conversations into these first weeks together. Yet her discourse never strayed into the personal. She would speak of a particular painting or fresco that we were going to see, or the mass we would attend, or of the pointed shoes we were to buy in the best leather botteghe of the Rialto district. Once she got me up early to take me to the fish market, a place of strange dead shoals with staring glass eyes, and a stench like a rabbit warren. She showed me the Jewish quarter, where the infidels were sequestered for their protection and, she said, the city’s. She took me to the island of Murano, where Venice’s foremost export is made—glassware. There I watched leather-clad craftsmen working at their furnaces, and making miracles from hot amber globs of molten sand. With their long iron poles they blew bubbles of saffron glass that cooled to rose, to be pinched and pulled this way and that till a beauteous vase appeared as if by miracle. Coughing at the sulfurous fumes of that merry little hell, I was warm for the first time since I had come to this freezing city. We traveled thence to the island of Burano, where identical old ladies sat black clad in every doorway, catching the last warmth of a dying winter sun, tatting delicate froths of thread in their laps, not even looking at their hands as they created lace as delicate as the snowflakes that would soon come to these islands. Autumn bleached to winter and my mother continued relentlessly to teach me of my home. It was she who told me that in the winter months it is best to go about masked, with a posy of dried flowers and herbs stuffed beneath my nose, for the contagion of plague and lung fever swept in from the lagoon. It was she who taught me to keep hot rocks in my pocket, to warm my freezing hands as the days drew in. It was she who taught me that there is only one piazza in Venice, that of Saint Mark where our palace was placed, and that all other squares were known as campi, or “fields.” It was she who showed me round the great Basilica, numbered and named all the saints, explained every fresco, showed me the priceless treasures within. It was she who told me that this gold-lined church was not the city’s cathedral but my father’s private chapel, and bade me then to understand the power of my family, the power of the Mocenigos. Marveling at the rich booty of this place, the golden Pala d’Oro altar screen, the richly jeweled icon of Saint Mark, the quartet of bronze horses stolen from the East, a growing impression of the last months clotted into certainty. I had heard every word of my mother’s instruction but, ignorant as I was, I could still draw my own conclusions. I knew this place for what it was—Venice was a city of booty. This pirate people had stolen everything that distinguished it from somewhere else. The treasures in the Basilica, the style and design of the windows on every palazzo, even the words in the Venetian dialect, were looted from the East.
I learned, too, from my mother, what happened to enemies of my father’s rule—I walked with her through the sumptuous rooms of the palace, through a tiny doorway and down narrow darkwood stairs to the chambers of torture and imprisonment known as the wells, or pozzi, for they are so sunken and cold, set as they are below the waterline of the canal. One room will stay with me always, a gloomy paneled square, three stairs in the dead center of the room leading nowhere but to a cruel noose hanging above. I walked, too, around the damp cells of the notorious jail, where the imprisoned are watched every moment, for if a guard lets his charge escape, he finishes his prisoner’s sentence. No one had broken free yet, my mother told me with cruel pride and a warning. Petty criminals were kept at the roof of the palace, the piombi, or leads, where the heat of the roof tiles made their lives unbearable. In summer months their blood would boil, their flesh sizzle in preparation for hellfires. Hotter than coal or colder than ice was the choice for the unruly in Venice—I hardly knew which extreme of misery was worse. As I heard the drip of the walls and the cries of the inmates, I keened for Brother Guido, in his similar fate. Yet I could not share such thoughts. And still, in all this time, my mother would never refer to our relationship, nor our pasts, nor our meeting. She was tolerable company, accomplished, funny even—witty enough to make my frozen belly laugh, but never did I once feel that we were mother and daughter. I watched her, though, with reluctant admiration; she had a soft low voice which I tried to emulate. I began to curb my filthy tongue at her command. I watched her walk into a room and began to imitate her seamless glide—even on the awkward platforms of the chopines she had a graceful stride, while I lurched and stumbled like a newborn foal. I watched her stand as if a golden thread passed through her body and out the top of her head, holding herself as erect as a queen. I ate my food as daintily as she—watched her white hands pick at morsels or daintily cut with her trencher knife. I began to wipe my mouth on my sleeve as she did, not the back of my hand. I began to carry a silken kerchief to wipe my nose when I had the ague, rather than blowing it directly into my skirt or my hair as I’d been used. I admired her as a woman and her easy way of conversing with everyone with charm—from the man who rowed our gondola to the princes of the Orient who came to dine. I admired her, yes, but she was not a mother to me. She took her desire to reconstruct my past to its logical conclusion. She instructed me, in great detail, how a dollop of pig’s-trotter jelly inserted into my woman’s part the night before the wedding would form a skin o’ernight to be broken the next eve, and make me once again a virgin. I did not have to ask how she knew this jade’s trick—clearly she had gulled my father with such arts. This was the closest that we ever came to an intimate conversation. Even on the days when the sun shone near as hot as Tuscany, and we repaired to the roof with our sewing, we never spoke of what lay within our hearts, even though we were totally alone. At such times we wore wide-brimmed hats with holes at the crown, and spread our identical golden locks out in the sun’s rays, to bake to an even lighter gold. I would look at my mother, dignified even in this garb, from under the safety of the wide, wide brim and search her face while she did not see me. We were alike. But we could not have been more different.
I met my father officially shortly after my arrival—on the day of his return to Venice I was allowed to watch him in audience with some of his citizens. After three moot sessions on various shipping rights, and one neighborly dispute about right-of-way on the canal, he beckoned me to him. I kissed his hand as expected, looked into his pale blue eyes and felt nothing. His skin had a waxy pallor, and his dignified stillness added to the impression that he was not, in fact, real.
“I am glad to see you back, Luciana,” he said, kindly enough. “You may kiss us.” I had no time to press my lips to his tallow cheek before I was ushered from the room. And that was the closest I ever got to him. I saw him little, for he even ate apart from us except for formal occasions, and then he sat at the head of the great dining board, as distant from me as the moon. Faraway he may have been, but he was still close enough for me to observe one important detail. On the thumb of his left hand, he wore a golden ring, adorned with nine golden balls—the Medici palle.
My father was one of the Seven.
My intended groom, Niccolò della Torre, was not mentioned, but I knew that my marriage treaty held with the city of Pisa. I even toyed with swallowing my pride and begging Niccolò to intercede for his cousin. Madonna, I would even marry the wight if he could save Brother Guido—but I was kept from his sight until the spring when my instruction was complete. If he visited my father’s house I did not know it, and I was kept from all negotiations. From snippets of gossip from my washerwoman I knew that the dowry was settled and the wedding set for summer, but I could not think of this now. I would never wed him, and knew in my heart that there could be no use in pleading for Brother Guido; I recalled Niccolò’s venomous person and knew such pleas would fall on deaf ears.
But as I settled into my new life I thought of Brother Guido constantly. I was a three-legged dog or a bird with one wing—so used was I to his companionship for those sweet months. And now I knew not whether he lived or died. My mother, pleased with my obedience during her instruction, kept her word and made inquiries as to his whereabouts from the Florentine commune. I paced my room waiting for an answer, and when the runner finally returned, the news was good: Guido della Torre had been released from Bargello but nothing further was known. I felt a huge rush of joy at the news, but soon began to fret once again; I knew that if he’d been released into the hands of his cousin, he may have been safer in jail. I pestered my mother to find out more, and in the space of time that was only a sennight but seemed a year, she reported to me. In a voice filled with truth (I must admit), she informed me that my monkish friend had been released into the arms of the brothers at Santa Croce there to continue his calling on the condition that he did not try to leave their precincts. Relief filled my chestspoon, although a note of doubt sounded—I knew he did not want to reclaim his monkish life, but supposed that, if faced with death, he might have made his peace with his Lord. With that, I had to be content, until I could find a way to quit this place. For I was now trapped indeed. Not just by the city but by the winter, the cruel winds, mountain snows to the north, and freezing tides. However, nothing less than this news could have made me stay. My mother watched my reaction to the news carefully, in some ways as relieved as I. She suspected, I knew, that had I known Brother Guido to be in true danger I would have found a way, somehow, to leave that night.
Yet I was not content for long with my precious snippet of information, and my doubt at Brother Guido’s religious about-face swelled on the horizon like a cloud fattened with rain. I needed some contact, some more news of how he did. Was he well? Had he truly found the church again? I worked as hard as I could with my stern Dominican tutor and one day after a lesson I scratched out a laborious, blotted, short note—an ink-stained plea for information, with pain and hope in every word. After long deliberation I decided to send the missive to Brother Nicodemus, the herbalist, as I did not wish to invite suspicion or draw attention to my friend by having him receive strange messages from Venice. I felt sure the Medicis would be keeping a close eye upon him. I wrote the direction myself and sent a runner to Florence on my own account; these little freedoms were small compensation for my watery prison.
When the reply came, all hope died. Brother Nicodemus of Padua had, of his great kindness, written a reply so simple that I could read it.
“You are mistook. Brother Guido not at Santa Croce; in Bargello awaiting trial. Courage.”
Black hate filled my heart against my mother. That lying bitch. How could I have ever thought her noble, found her companiable? I, even I, had been seduced by her company, after sixteen years of desertion. And she had repaid me with this. How she must have laughed at her little deception. I spent the afternoon in my room, alternating my humors between rage at my mother and anguish at Brother Guido’s fate. How long would he wait for trial before facing the inevitable noose? Had they tortured him, damaged him in mind or body? How long did I have to save him?
I toyed with the idea of confronting my mother with her fraud but knew it would avail me nothing. I was in the Shelion’s den and she would do anything, say anything, to keep me there. It would not do to show her all I knew. I was learning the Venetian way.
Betimes I thought of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his hellish assassin, and allowed myself to speculate on their future plans—for it was certain now that the father of Florence was one of the Seven and had some deadly plot in mind. But such thoughts never occupied me for more than a heartbeat; I forgot all about the thirty-two roses, whatever they may mean, and the rest of the clues we had unearthed in our month-long odyssey. I hid the cartone in an inlaid chest in my room, but never took it out to look—the pain was too great, for I had pored over it so often with him that was gone. I cared not for any plot nor painting anymore—just for my lost companion. I would not rest easy till I saw him again, but as the winter closed in I knew I must wait. Unbearable though it was, I must contemplate a winter here in this freezing city, without the warmth that knowledge of my friend’s fate would give me. I knew, too, that the commune of Florence did not keep miscreants alive for long—there were enough thieves and varmints to fill the Bargello twice over, and the turnover was fast—my friend would soon be dispatched.

From the day the herbalist’s letter reached me, I began to plan my escape.