“Do not tempt me, signore. You cannot keep me from her.”
“Marco,” I called past my ravaged throat, through dry lips.
Both voices fell silent.
“Marco,” I called again.
He opened the door and stepped inside. “Simonetta? You are awake?”
Even after everything, it nearly broke my heart to see the pain and sorrow on his face. He looked as though he had aged ten years since that night when he had found Sandro’s sketch of me, when we had argued. It was the last time we had really spoken, I realized. “Marco, please,” I said. Over his shoulder, I could glimpse Sandro through the open door. “Let him in. I wish to see him.”
Marco’s eyes hardened. “Simonetta, please. This is hardly—”
“Please,” I said. “This is the last thing I shall ask of you.”
At that, his expression crumpled, and he dropped his head into his hands. “Very well,” he said. Abruptly he turned and stalked out of the room. “You may go in,” I heard him say shortly to Sandro. “She wishes to see you.”
Sandro stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. He rushed to my side, sitting on the bed next to me and taking my hand in his. “Simonetta, my Simonetta,” he said. I could hear the tears in his voice.
I closed my eyes, recalling when he had sighed my name as he moved within me. It seemed like it was decades ago, and yet it was one of the last things that I remembered clearly. If I could have no other memories left to me, I thought, then that one would be enough. “Sandro,” I said, my fingers curling around his. “You are here. You knew.”
“I did, my love,” he said. “I knew. Nothing could have kept me from your side.”
“I have wanted to see you,” I said. “You must promise me something.”
His strong hand tightened on mine. “Anything.”
I opened my eyes, taking in his beloved, handsome face: his wide eyes, his beautiful features, his tousled blond hair. “You must promise me that you shall finish the painting,” I said. “The Birth of Venus.”
“Oh, Simonetta,” he said, his emotions nearly choking him. “I … I do not know if I can. Not without you.”
“You must,” I said, raising my voice. “You must, for me. It will be a testament of our love. So that all the world might know. Remember? So that no one will ever forget. Promise me.”
Tears slid freely down his cheeks. He nodded. “I promise, Simonetta. I swear on my life that I shall do it, for you. So that you may live forever, as I told you once that you would.”
I closed my eyes again. “Thank you. Thank you, my love.”
We both fell silent for a moment, then I opened my eyes when he spoke again. “When I die,” he said softly, so softly that if he had been any farther away, I would not have heard him, “I shall be buried at your feet. It will be my last wish.”
I smiled and let my eyes drift closed. “I shall await you in Elysium, my love. I shall save a place for you. I will wait for you there.”
When I awoke again, he was gone. And I wept.
*
I do not know how many days have passed since Sandro came. I wish that I might have slipped away with him there beside me, holding my hand, yet I was denied that comfort. If that is to be the punishment for everything I have done, so be it.
I drift in and out of dreams, though I cannot always tell that they are so. I dream of The Birth of Venus, dream that I stand before the finished canvas with Sandro at my side, and that I weep at its beauty. I dream myself into another life, one where I am not ill, one where I am not the daughter of a noble family from Genoa, one where I am not Marco Vespucci’s wife. In this life, I am a simple Tuscan peasant, and free to marry Sandro for love. I keep his house and tidy his workshop, and we make love every day and he holds me all through the night.
I see our children, beautiful and golden-haired, the children that we would have had together, the children I was never meant to have with Marco. I see them grow up to be artists and poets and statesmen, and there are tears in my eyes, tears of pride and of sorrow for these magnificent children that never came to be.
I pose for Sandro, and he creates the greatest works of art that the world has ever seen. This last I know, at least, is true.
And now I have woken from these dreams, from these other lives I’ve lived even as I am dying, and I am alone, save for one figure. For Death is beckoning to me at last, and I see now that he is blind: blind to my beauty, blind to my youth, blind to what my destiny should have been; blind to all but my soul and, no doubt, the sins that mar it. But I am not afraid.
Sandro promised me that I would live forever.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci died on the night of April 26, 1476, at the age of 22 or 23 (her exact date of birth is not known) of consumption, which we today call pulmonary tuberculosis. She was indeed regarded as the most beautiful woman in Florence and, according to some, in all of Italy. Thousands followed her funeral procession through the streets of Florence, where her open coffin was carried so that the populace could view her famed beauty one last time—a fact that strikes me as incredibly morbid. She is buried in the Vespucci’s parish church of the Ognissanti, which still sits on the bank of the river Arno and is open to the public.
Marco Vespucci remarried shortly after Simonetta’s death. He was a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, the famed explorer who gave his name to the New World.
Clarice Orsini de’ Medici also died of consumption, in July 1487. While her relationship with Lorenzo is nowhere described as being a particularly loving one, they did have ten children together, six of whom survived to adulthood. Their son Giovanni de’ Medici would go on to become Pope Leo X, the first of two Medici popes.
Nowhere in my research did I come across any explicit evidence that Clarice and Simonetta were close friends, but they would certainly have known each other, and so I took the liberty of making them so in my story.