The Botticelli Secret

34
Bonaccorso Nivola, Bonaccorso Nivola.
I had heard the fear in his voice. I remembered he had said, “Does her mum know?” Not her dad. I remembered how he had paled when he thought the dogaressa stood before him. I realized he knew what I had divined when I first came here—the She-lion was beautiful but deadly. I ached for his family—suffered agonies of guilt about the unknown, unseen Lisabetta. If she had loved her man as I loved mine, what agonies must rack her now? Her man lay in jail as did mine; we shared a fate but hers was a hundred times more dire—she was a widow in truth, with fatherless babes and no money, an empty bed and an empty cupboard and an empty heart and no wealth to ease her days. Dead reckoning—Signor Cristoforo’s phrase came back to me, and suddenly seemed to have enormous significance to the fate of the poor sailor who had agreed to navigate me out of here. I vowed one day to send succor to Bonaccorso’s wife and children, for God only knew if he would ever quit the pozzi. At least Signor Cristoforo had, if my mother spoke truth, been merely banished—allowed to return to his brother and his beloved map shop by the sea, and thence to his wife and the son he had never seen but could bring tears to his eyes at a word. For that I was glad.
But my own cause was hopeless. I knew that I would now not be able to escape; that I would languish here until, by a cruel twist of fortune, I would be taken over the mountains to Pisa where I would be wed to the cousin of the man I loved. To be reminded every day by the similarities of blood that I had bought a counterfeit, a poor copy of the man I wanted. Worse still, Brother Guido was still in the Bargello, a jail at least as bad as the one I had just fled.
In despair I went to the inlaid chest at my window—had she searched my room? No, the gold I had stolen from her room the night before was all there. I took it out and tied it in the kerchief I had meant to give to Bonaccorso Nivola for my passage. I strapped the packet of coins tightly to my upper thigh. If it could not buy me freedom, I could at least send it to his family as I had pledged. There was something else in the bottom of the chest lying forgotten and crumpled. I drew it out. The cartone.
I opened the casement to cast the thing out into the lagoon, for it had destroyed Enna, Bembo, Brother Remigio, Bonnacorso, Brother Guido. And me. But it was the one thing that still connected me to Brother Guido. The one thing left to me that we had both touched. My fingers would not give the parchment up, however hard the west wind snatched at it. In the howl and moan of the warm current, Signor Cristoforo’s words ebbed back to me, as if the spring tide carried them.
The west wind. The west wind heralds the spring. Zephyrus.
I closed the window abruptly. Lit a candle. I unrolled the painting carefully, tenderly, weighted the corners as we always used to do. Looked once more on the picture that my lost love and I had gazed on so oft together. My eyes were drawn to the figure of Chloris—my mother, who had tasted a man’s blood today—looking innocent, frightened, running from the blue-winged wraith at her right shoulder.
Zephyrus.
Her hands reached toward the figure of Flora—toward me—for help. I noted the shift Chloris wore was so close to that which my mother wore today. Then I noted again the flowers that issued from her mouth. And the herbalist’s words came to me once again.
Flowers drop like truths from her mouth.
Suddenly I knew that they must mean something and I set my jaw. Very well. If I could not escape, I could at least foil whatever deadly plan my mother was cooking up with Lorenzo de’ Medici. I concentrated hard—checking the flowers that fell from her mouth against the ones that we had identified on Flora’s garb, racking my pained memory to recall all that was said in the herbarium, forcing myself to recall his sweet face, his sweet voice, his long hands writing down the names of the flowers. I looked hard at each bloom. There seemed to be ten in all, although I could see at once that a number of them were duplicates; there was more than one of each type of flower. I counted four different types in all, and after a great deal of thought I believed that I had identified them. The two flowers almost lodged between Chloris’s teeth were occhiocento, or “hundred eyes,” a common flower of the hedgerow. Then I knew the little white flower with the yellow center to be the anemone, by recalling the herbalist’s teachings. Next fell two coral roses, of exactly the type I had held in my skirts, the roses which we had been at such pains to number in vain, for we had never reached any useful conclusions about the number thirty-two. Finally, a twin-headed corn-flower, blue as the twilight lagoon. A fiordaliso. Ten flower heads and four types of flower. Occhiocento, anemone, rose, and fiordaliso. I could not divine further for try as I might I could not recall the Latin for any flower but the rose, even if I ever knew it. So all I had to work with was the number four, the number ten, or the letters R, F, O, and A.
I sighed. I sensed it would be useless to try to construct a word from this quartet—for one thing, the flower names I knew were in Tuscan not Latin, and for another, I could barely read at this point, and barely set down letters in the right order, let alone construct a word from a jumble of letters. Still, there were only four, and I resolved to try. I knew what I was about—I was taking refuge in the puzzle. If my brain were busy doing this, that poor member could not dwell on the real horrors of the day, nor the imagined horrors that could befall another man, in another jail, in another city-state. Well, then.
R for rose
A for anemone
F for fiordaliso
O for occhiocento
The exercise was short. Eventually, painstakingly, I came up with:
RAFO
ROFA
OFAR
ORAF
FARO
FORA
AFRO
ARFO
None of these seemed to me to make a word, at least, not one that I knew. I wished heartily for another flower with another convenient letter. If only I had an L, for instance, I could make FLORA, which would seem suggestive (of what I did not know). But my desires could not add what was not there—I must stick with what I had. Perhaps if I added one letter for each bloom—two F’s as two fiordalisi were shown? And so on. But this didn’t work either—I was left with a crazy collection of letters, none of them useful to me.
Presently I turned from letters to numbers. Perhaps the number four, the number of flower types, or the number ten, the number of blooms, was suggestive—but here I was graveled even sooner. There were four seasons and four winds and four apostles, but I could not think of any tens save commandments and only because I had broken most of those.
I gave up and stared from the window, seeing nothing. From habit I rolled the cartone and placed it in my bodice. It was no good. Like a moth frighted from the candle when he scorches his wing, like a wasp frighted from a ripe peach by the angry diner’s hand, I returned again and again to the place that spelled my doom. I could not help but think of him that I had lost. I recalled another evening in another place, where I had stared once before over another sea. That evening it was the Bay of Naples the day I had come upon Brother Guido lying in his bed, back scourged till it ran with blood for the sin of kissing me. Now, hundreds of leagues into the north, my heart bled out too, and I grew colder and stiller. Perhaps it were best that we should part, that he should die, for I could never have been with him again and not touched him, not kissed him. Better that he should die, and me too.
I stayed in my room all day, refusing all food and drink and company. The sun drowned in the lagoon and the gondoliers and whores competed for evening trade. Exhausted, defeated by the sleeplessness of the night before and the day’s exertions, I fell fully clothed onto my bed, asleep at once.
Only to wake as my mother entered my room. I knew it was she even before I could see her—my back was to the open door, but I knew her from the swish of her skirts and the sounds of her breath. I knew from the thrill of fear in my chestspoon and the thin film of sweat on my upper lip. I fought to keep my own breathing steady, to feign sleep. But opened my eyes a tiny degree and peered through my lashes. She walked into my view, an angel of midnight, her face lit from below by a rush dip candle, her hair a gold halo. She went first to the window and her breath misted the quarrel panes of the glass, for it was a wild night outside with the rain coming down in stripes. It would have been a torrid voyage to Mestre, rain soaked and rough seaed, but I had rather been there than here under the eyes of this woman. She turned and I closed my eyes again, breathed steady to belie my wakefulness. I heard her search the room, quickly and quietly. I heard her open the inlaid chest where the gold and the cartone had lain till this very night, but there was nothing now within. The gold I had stolen was safe in my makeshift money belt under my skirts, and the painting now nestled in its accustomed home in my bodice. I silently thanked the Virgin that I had not changed to my nightshift this eve and that both secrets were upon my person. There was naught for her to find, and realizing this she turned to go. Gliding so smoothly across the rush mats that I wondered if she slept still. Then she stopped and I felt her eyes on me, heard her approach. The bed sagged as she sat beside me and I waited for the cold slice of the knife that had unmanned Bonaccorso Nivola. Still I did not let her see me wake; if she wished me dead I would die now, for all that I lived for was lost to me. I felt a touch, but it was a gentle hand that brushed a golden curl from my eye, tucked it tenderly behind my ear. Then she bent close, kissed me sweetly on the cheek as if I were still the babe that she had bottled and sent away. I felt her breath warm on my cheek, misting my skin as it had misted the glass; I felt the touch of her lips, the lips that hid the tongue that tasted the knife. Then she was gone.

It rained all night, outside my window and on my pillow.