“Indeed. These are trying times.” Ridolfi had positioned himself so that Iacopo could not look at both men at the same moment, but had to turn his head from one to the other as they addressed him. “It seems our Iacopo might rise to the challenge, given the chance. Would you concur, Ser Acciaioli?”
Acciaioli nodded gravely. “It does appear so. I am encouraged that in the young Medici we have found our man.”
At last, my time has come. They will acknowledge my birthright, and my contribution to the plan against Siena. Iacopo sat up straighter in his chair.“You shall not regret any task you set me.”
Ridolfi’s next question was a surprise. “How fares the search for your painter—Accorsi, did you call him?”
Why do they ask me this now? Is this some test, and if so, what must I do to pass it? Iacopo felt his face flush and welcomed the dark of the room. “I have not found him yet. But I know now where he lives, and the house is watched. And Ser Signoretti has vowed to stand against him in the Podestà’s court. I am well positioned to achieve my father’s aims.”
Ridolfi’s eyes flickered toward Acciaioli before settling on Iacopo’s face again. “Iacopo, we have a plan that would bring your father’s informant to justice, and also serve the larger purpose—to bring Siena under Florentine control.”
“Certainly I would be proud to be its instrument.” Instrument, I should not have used that word. Instrument is a word they would use. But Ridolfi and Acciaioli both nodded gravely, cementing his pledge.
“That is excellent news, most excellent news, Iacopo de’ Medici.” Thus, Iacopo swore fealty to the cause before he knew the extent of what he would be required to do. And once he had heard, once the two members of his father’s confraternity set out the plan before him in its chilling detail, it was too late to refuse.
* * *
Iacopo had heard news of the malady, brought by traders from the Orient, newly arrived in Firenze. Those infected died an agonizing death, bulging with purulent buboes at the groin and under the arms, and drowning in their own bloody vomitus. When it began to spread from one member of a household to the next, then to the doctors who came to minister to the sick, and finally to the priests who gave the dying their last rites, word spread faster than the disease itself of its rare, rapid contagion. The Mortalità, men began to call it, the great death, for with it came a certainty of destruction far beyond any illness known. Ser Acciaioli, righteous in the pursuit of the piety he declared was his shield against contagion, addressed the full meeting of the Brotherhood in the chamber beneath the Medici palazzo. “Our efforts to raise a rebellion among Siena’s casati have been too small, and too slow.” There, he announced the plan that he and Ser Ridolfi had formed against Siena. And Iacopo, Acciaioli said with a grim smile, would be the one to carry it out. “God has provided us with a weapon, in this Mortalità,” he said. “Iacopo, having proven his dedication, and his worth, shall be the one to wield it.” Iacopo watched the faces around the table mouth their assent, but he could not hear the words for the roaring in his ears.
* * *
It was then that Iacopo became acquainted with the Becchini, the city’s pallbearers. The Becchini roamed the city, robed in black or dark red cloaks that fell nearly to the ground, and wore hoods and masks so that only their eyes showed. They would enter a house touched by the Pestilence when no others would, extorting exorbitant sums for their services, and demanding those under threat of violence. Few would do their job, and they could set their own price. Some said the Becchini were unhinged by their proximity to death, and the consequences of their contact with the festering bodies of the victims. They acted as if they had no fear of purgatory. Bands took to entering homes where none had yet died and demanding gold before they would leave the premises, for they were known to carry the contagion with them, bringing destruction wherever they went.
“Iacopo, where are you going?” The undercurrent of fear in Immacolata’s voice was audible, and with reason, for a man who left his house to walk Firenze’s streets might die before the sun rose on the following day.
“Il Ponte Vecchio, Mamma.” The lie came haltingly off his tongue. “I have business to resolve with a goldsmith there.”
“Your father never did business there before. Why should you start now, when the smiths have begun to abandon their shops?”
“My father’s business is my task, not yours.”
But Iacopo’s mother read him as well as she had when he was a child, catching the thread of a lie easily. He closed his eyes to an old memory—he had spilled a jug of wine climbing up on the supper table, then blamed the cat. Immacolata had recounted the improbable story to his father at the supper table, protecting him from a beating. When Iacopo opened his eyes again he was startled by his mother’s aging face.
“Iacopo, you need not shoulder your father’s burdens alone.”
He was silent, longing to confide in her. Since his father’s death she seemed to have grown in size, filling in the space left by her husband’s departure. Iacopo’s solitude and his twisted thoughts made him yearn for the promise of her comfort. But he was past that possibility. “My father charged me to carry on his work, here in Firenze and abroad.”
“You are still my son, though fully grown in both stature and purpose. Tell me what you are about, caro Iacopo.”
He could in no way reveal his dark purpose: this planned partnership with the Mortalità itself. “I cannot.” When Iacopo left the palazzo, he knew his mother watched him.
Iacopo had arranged to meet a leader of the Becchini, steeling himself against revulsion and fear. He’d been assured that the man showed no signs of illness, but the Pestilence might be boiling invisibly in a man’s blood, waiting to burst out into the buboes that heralded certain death. The appointed meeting place, an abandoned calzoleria whose owner had perished in the Mortalità, was unlit and musty. Unfinished hose and patterns for shoes lay on the table in the center of the workshop with no one to resume their making. The pallbearer called himself only Angelo, and he kept his face hidden. Angelo—the Angel of Death.
“I have a proposition for you,” Iacopo said, dropping a bag of gold onto the table between them.
“Tell me of your plan, and I will tell you the price,” Angelo said.
Iacopo, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task he had been set, found his mouth trembling so violently he could barely speak. “I would have your men travel to Siena,” Iacopo said, “and bring your contagion with you.”
“We will need more gold than this to travel the distance you require,” Angelo’s voice rasped.
“You will have it in allotments as you perform what I have bidden. I know better than to pay too much in advance of the task.”