The Botticelli Secret

33
I did not sleep that night, and would have spent the next day in a jitter but was informed at breakfast by the witch Marta that my mother had a particular excursion to take me on today. I steeled myself for a day of polite chatter as we circled the canals of Venice in the Bucintoro and wondered how I could bear the burden of my guilty secret without breaking down under her green eye and admitting all. But when I met my mother in the presence chamber she was wearing no mask and had left off her platformed clogs. She wore a cream lace shift and a sleeveless surcoat of her favorite green, with tiny gold lions embroidered at the hem. She wore no jewels or ornaments, but as ever with my mother her costume was not less than priceless. I don’t know much, but I do know clothes; the workmanship of the lace had clearly demanded that the old ladies of Burano worked their ancient fingers to the quick, and the embroidery of the tiny lions at the hem of her gown was worth hundreds of ducats alone. Yet her hair was unbound and rippled to her waist. She had left her face unpainted, had merely rubbed her lips with a shiny salve so they glowed full and natural rose, and touched her eyelids with the same gloss so her eyes were left to speak for themselves, the green of deep, deep water. She looked about fifteen. I knew then that all my finery, the primping and preening of my ladies, was worth naught—my mother in her most natural state was the Venus of this sea. Yet when she smiled I thought she looked more mortal and friendly than I had ever seen her. For one instant I felt a pang that I was about to lose her again, my Vero Madre, the woman I had obsessed about finding for all these years.
She took my hand. “Come,” she said. “Today we are to learn the most valuable lesson of all. We are to learn about justice—Venetian justice.”
The words were strangely at odds with her innocent appearance.
Somewhere, a distant chime of foreboding sounded in my head.
She led me through numerous passages to the inner sanctum of the palace—a warren of offices and passageways that interlocked with the public rooms of the building. Such was her power and presence that her servants melted away as we approached; rooms emptied when we entered, as everyone ceased their business and gave us privacy for our progress. At length we fetched up at a quartet of darkwood offices I had never seen before. Set within the walls of one such chamber was a lion’s head with a gaping mouth, leading God knew where. It was a terrible thing, and I tasted fear in my mouth—I now faced the beast that I so feared.
“La Bocca del Leone,” announced my mother. “The Lion’s Mouth. Political traitors are denounced here, in writing—the accusation writ down and passed through the mouth to the offices within. Our judicial system relies on such information for the wheels to turn aright.”
My heart plummeted, as I realized that those that filled the prisons below and above us began their journeys here, damned by their friends, rivals, or jealous associates.
I had to clear my throat twice before I could speak. “Is not such a system . . . open to abuse?” I stammered. “I mean . . . is it not used for . . . vengeance?”
She shrugged. “Betimes. But what matter? In each case we exact punishment to fit the crime, in case there is a kernel of truth in the matter.”
I swallowed.
“You will forgive me, my dear Luciana,” she went on, “if we now repeat a little of your former tour—I believe that the best tutors believe in the revision of earlier learned lessons, do they not?” She flashed a green glance at me and I had to drop my eyes—suddenly stone-cold certain she was talking about Signor Cristoforo. “So I will not apologize, but merely assure you that you will not find it dull.”
We went once again through the gloomy paneled chambers to the little door in the wall; I knew now—at the back of my mind I had always known—where we were going. Once again, we descended the darkwood stairs to the prisons—the under-belly of the Venetian state. The chime of terror grew stronger and my skin started to prickle. Once again light turned to dark as we left the airy palace for the dark passages of the pozzi—once again the shrieks of prisoners reached my ears, the pleas of the sane and the babblings of the ones who had run mad. Once again the biting cold turned my skin to plucked chicken, and the killing damp entered my chestspoon. I saw scratches above the doors indicating the numbers of the cells—once names, the prisoners were now numbers, waiting for torture or death, for release would never come.
“Here,” said my mother lightly. She nodded to the burly guard who uncrossed his beefy arms and stood aside.
I looked questioningly at my mother, who nodded. I stepped inside, half expecting the clang of the door behind me. For I was certain, now, that my mother knew something. Instead I was assailed by the smell of shit and vomit, overlaid by a sweet alien smell. My nose recognized the odor before my brain did—I was back in my old house by the Arno, the floor a car-mine pool, my feet wet from the gore, my eyes looking down on Enna, her throat slit and gushing.
Blood.
In the corner a creature of darkness was curled like a babe, keening and crying, his tears dripping in time with the water from the walls. I recoiled from the thing before me and looked at my mother’s dispassionate face. Conversationally, as if she were introducing guests at a gathering, she said the horrible words.
“Of course, you know Signor Bonaccorso Nivola.”
At the sound of his name, like a child or a dog that is sensible of no more than what he is called, the thing in the corner uncurled and turned his face to mine. I could not look upon what I saw there, so dropped my eyes to worse—his hose had been slashed at his groin, and a single bloody appendage dangled there, unnatural, two essential orbs missing in a gruesome mirroring of what had happened to his face. The knife, newly wet from the deed, lay guiltily by on a wooden stool, and my mother picked it up, laid both edges against her tongue in turn and tasted the man’s blood. The stain rouged her unpainted lips and her eyes glittered in the dark like jade. I fled the cell then, and as I vomited I comprehended what I had seen.
His eyes and balls were gone.
As I heaved I was conscious of someone rubbing my back, an action any normal mother would employ with a sickly child.
“Your tutor has gone back to Genoa,” she said. “We did not harm him. But your father and I would like you to stay.”
Again it was said with kindness and affection, as if to a guest who wished to take leave too soon.
The guard, used to such scenes, looked on with dispassion. He pulled a filthy cloth from his belt, dropped it over my leavings, and scuffed the mess back and forth with his foot, leaving a wet smear on the flags. My mother flipped him a ducat, payment for removing the dogaressina’s vomit. And I stumbled back up the stairs, back along the passages, back to my room.