“Then it is true?”
“I hired the Becchini to come to Siena, bringing contagion in their wake. I brought the commune to her knees, as the Brotherhood bid me do, and as my father would have done, had he lived. And it was well done—it was well done!” Iacopo’s voice rose, shrill and desperate.
As the Brotherhood bid me do. Even if Iacopo were stopped, there were others out there, still plotting. Was this the conspiracy Ben had discovered? The fall of Siena’s Nine was only six years away, the beginning of the weakening of the great regime, and Siena’s independence would end under Florentine rule more than a hundred years from now. Would this Brotherhood, whoever they were, have a hand in it? What if the meeting with Signoretti had been part of the plan? What if the Plague’s devastation was only the beginning?
While my mind was racing, Gabriele spoke quietly to Iacopo, as if he were trying to calm a frightened horse. “If it was my death you sought, you should have left my fellow citizens alone.”
“I saved your death for last, Accorsi.”
Immacolata’s words were edged with steel. “Iacopo, you have used a weapon no man should wield. And if you kill this honest man who stands before you, this man who did his duty to his commune, I shall not pray to save your soul.”
“My own mother would forsake me?”
“I will deny I ever had a son.”
“My father’s blood runs in my veins. His blood and his cause.” Because I had failed to find the record of Iacopo’s birth, I did not need supernatural empathy to know what Immacolata was about to say.
“You do not share his blood, and need not share his cause. You are a foundling whom I called my own. And now I see the evil in the child I chose.” Immacolata’s words created a stillness after them. The wind whistled through the breaks in the Torre’s top, a high, mournful keening. Then Iacopo’s shoulders straightened, as if a weight had lifted from his narrow back.
* * *
Giovanni de’ Medici is not my father. At first the words brought Iacopo sweet relief. My father did not beat his wife until her shoulders bloomed with bruises. My father did not rain blows down on my head while I cried for help that never came. My father did not kill a man of Siena’s night watch and hang from the gallows for his crime.
“If he is not my father, then I am free of him, and free to do as I wish.” Iacopo’s heart lifted as the words left his mouth.
Immacolata had not moved from her spot at the top of the stairs. “You are free to spare the life of this innocent man. But any sins you have already committed, and any sins you commit from this day forth, will rest upon your head, and upon your soul for eternity.”
In the wake of his mother’s words, Iacopo’s relief faded as fast as it had come. For if he could not blame his birthright, he had only his own miserable self to blame. His words in Angelo’s ear had carried the Mortalità’s curse to Siena’s most noble citizens, and his own shaking hand now held a knife to Accorsi’s neck. All that Iacopo had once thought to be true crumbled beneath him—his parentage, and his purpose.
“He despised me, because he knew I was not his. Do you despise me too?”
“I am your mother, and I love my son as much as any woman who bears a child from her womb. What I reject in you is not your blood, but your evil acts. Listen to me now, and drop the knife. Let no more sin stain your soul.”
Iacopo lowered his hand slowly, letting the knife slide out of his grip. The three watched him: Accorsi, wary and still, the black-haired woman who had discovered his secret, and his own mother, familiar and strange all at once. Iacopo felt as if he were receding irrevocably away from the shore on which they stood. They belonged to the world of the living, a world he could not rejoin.
Iacopo climbed the wall separating him from the dizzying drop to the Campo.
“Iacopo, come down.” Now his mother’s voice held fear. Perhaps she does love me. But her love is not enough.
“I will let the painter live, Mamma”—even now Iacopo could not keep from calling her by that lovely name—“but I shall not come down. There is nothing that holds me to this earth now, neither your fear nor your love. I am beyond both.”
* * *
Iacopo edged sideways along the wall until he was out of Gabriele’s reach. Seconds stretched as the four of us stood, one above and three below. It could have been a painting: Iacopo’s shape loomed dark against the backdrop of moving clouds, and Immacolata’s hands emerged white from the sleeves of her cloak like a pair of doves. I had the feeling that Iacopo was part of the wall, the sky, the wind that blew his cloak out around him like an angel’s wings. Then into the silence, the tower’s bell began to ring for Vespers: the evening prayer.
“God forgive me,” Iacopo said, “and keep my mother safe.” Then he stepped off the wall, and into the view around us.
Immacolata’s howl split the air as Iacopo’s body hurtled toward the distant shell-shaped Campo below. For a fraction of a second Iacopo looked, splayed out with his arms and legs outstretched, as if he might fly.
PART XVI
HOME
Somehow I was standing with my hands pressed against the cold wet stone of the parapet. From the Torre’s height, I watched Immacolata run across the crowded Campo, her cloak a blur of dark green. The crowds parted before her as she fell onto Iacopo’s prostrate body, covering him like a blanket while the rain beat down upon them both.
Gabriele and I stood next to each other, silently looking down. We watched city officials in their black and white take Iacopo’s body away. We kept watching until the crowds dispersed, and then until the wind died and the heavy rain faded to a quiet mist.
In the stillness after the storm, I began to hear sounds around us—a flock of sparrows chittering in the Torre’s overhanging roof, the drip of water from a beam to the stone floor, Gabriele’s breathing next to me. I could feel the warmth emanating from him, and I smelled his cloak’s wet wool. The sun was low over Siena’s surrounding hills when Gabriele turned from the view to face me, and took my hand in his.
“Andiamo a casa?” Gabriele said—Shall we go home?
Home. The weight of all that home meant—what it used to mean and what it had come to mean for me—rested on those three sweet Italian words.
“Sì,” I answered. Yes.
And we walked home together in the fading light.
PART XVII
EPILOGUE