The Malice of Fortune Read online

  “Poor fellow,” Camilla said sadly of a much younger man, who retrieved a mule from the stables and proceeded to pace it dutifully around the courtyard, wearing only thin hose and a short jacket so threadbare that a louse would have slid off.

  “Look at his hair,” I said with less sympathy, “tossed helter-skelter atop his head like a spring salad. Messer Salad-head. But he is not a manservant. Do you see the ink on his fingers? An ambassador’s clerk. And mule keeper. Florentine. They are a republic now. And republics don’t pay to dress their clerks.”

  Having finished his circuits, the mule keeper began to feed the beast hay out of his hand, as if it were his child. He was engaged in this communion when a boy of perhaps twelve, attired in a peasant’s horsehair cape, with bare legs and shoes that might have been carved from gourds, entered through the stables and went at once to him. The two spoke briefly, whereupon the mule keeper plucked from his threadbare jacket a silver coin, which his visitor snatched eagerly before running out the way he had come.

  “Madonna?” Camilla said.

  I clutched her hand but said nothing.

  On the third day after our arrival in Imola, I still had heard nothing from the pope. That morning, when Camilla went out to secure our necessities, she had found the Imolese similarly uncertain of their own fates. “They tell me that Vitellozzo Vitelli took Fossombrone on All Saints’ Day,” Camilla reported, this being more than a month past and Fossombrone a fortress of considerable importance, though some distance south of here. “They say Valentino’s garrison was slaughtered to a man. But since then, Madonna, it is the living truth that no one has heard a thing, though they all fear that the condottieri will soon march on Imola, and put this city under siege.”

  I could presume that Vitellozzo Vitelli’s attack on Fossombrone was one of the traitorous acts His Holiness had reported to me in the Hall of Saints, the condottieri having wrested from Valentino’s loyal troops a fortress they had no doubt assisted the duke in securing only months previously. And like the Imolese, I could only guess what progress the rebel condottieri had achieved since then, an uncertainty that made the pope’s silence all the more unsettling. I peered anxiously through the shutters, almost expecting to find the invaders in the courtyard.

  Having no other occupation, I continued my vigil at the window, after a while observing the mule keeper begin his circuits, just as he had the previous day. But several times when he was opposite our rooms, he glanced up, as if he knew we were watching him.

  “Do you think we are spying on the pope’s spy?” I asked Camilla. “Perhaps His Holiness has withheld his ‘instruction’ because he expects that some accomplice will call on me, thus establishing my guilt.” I caught myself gnawing at my lower lip. “Darling, go down there and get his accent and try to make some sense of him. But don’t provide him any of our particulars. See what he is willing to give up.”

  Upon exiting our stairwell, Camilla stopped the mule keeper just after he had passed beneath our window; he was not much taller than she was and nearly as lithe. When she spoke, his dark eyes shined at her and his thin lips drew a smile across his narrow face. I was scarcely surprised that he found her agreeable; for her part, Camilla tilted her head in a fashion she has, as he replied to her with lively gestures.

  After a little while Camilla came back up, saying, “You were correct in believing he is Florentine, and a learned man—he speaks well-lettered Tuscan. He had a thousand questions about us, but I did not offer him anything, even when he gave me his name. Messer Niccolò. He thinks you are here to do business. Or so he implies.” She shook her head. “Madonna, on my oath I don’t think he knows enough about you to be the pope’s spy.”

  Here Camilla’s smile, which never remained long, fled her face. “But he told me something you will want to know. He wondered if we are staying in because of the murder ten days after All Saints’. When I asked what he was talking about, he said the peasants are still chattering about it, full of rumors of every sort. Madonna, this woman was … cut … She was cut into quarters.” Camilla’s eyes were wide. “And these pieces of her were scattered about the countryside. But her head has never been found.”

  “Ten days after All Saints’,” I said numbly, trying to escape the pictures in my mind. “That would be three weeks ago. Sufficient time for the pope to have been informed, to have dispatched me on this errand, and for us to arrive here. God’s Cross. She has to be the same woman who had Juan’s amulet in her charm bag.”

  I closed my eyes, to no avail, because the images were still waiting for me in the darkness. Perhaps there had been reason to take off this woman’s head. But what purpose had been served by butchering her like an ox at a Saturday market?

  This grim revelation led me to a more urgent question. “Why did His Holiness say nothing about the manner of her … perishing, when it seems to be common knowledge here? He did not say she had been dismembered. He merely told me she had been found in a field.” I peeked down into the courtyard. The Florentine had resumed his rounds. After a moment he glanced up, prompting me to step back. “ ‘The corners of the winds.’ Perhaps her murderers were boasting that they had scattered her to the winds. Just as they left Juan’s amulet in the same charm bag, to boast that they had also murdered him. But I cannot imagine why His Holiness did not remark on this connection.”

  “Madonna. Do you think His Holiness wanted to see if you already knew that connection?”

  I smiled, but only because Camilla was so clever. “Perhaps His Holiness believes these corners of the winds are the key to all of this, more so even than Juan’s amulet. And perhaps, as you say, he wondered if I already knew. Or does he believe I will discover their meaning for him? But unless the corners of the winds are in these rooms … What is His Holiness waiting on? For the condottieri and their armies to appear at the gates of Imola?”

  The Florentine’s young friend arrived, in the same fashion as the previous day. “You are most likely correct in assuming that your Messer Niccolò is not spying upon us, at least on the pope’s behalf,” I said, watching as the messenger received his stipend and exited. “Nonetheless, this boy is apprising him of something.”

  Camilla, who by earliest habit always looked for some way to be useful—an instinct without which she would not have survived her childhood—had begun to polish our little copper bathtub with a handful of sand from the courtyard. She did not look up as she asked, “Do you think they are watching for the condottieri?”

  I did not think so. But I said nothing. Instead, from deep in my memory I heard my mother’s voice: Cercar Maria per Ravenna. A saying she had taught me when I was just a girl: To search for Maria in Ravenna. If you don’t know, it comes from a story about a man who journeys to Ravenna, frantically pursuing a mysterious woman named Maria, with whom he is desperately in love. This man finds the object of his quest, only to uncover a most unpleasant secret about her that proves to be the death of him. So the saying is a warning—be careful of the truth you seek.

  I watched Messer Niccolò lead his animal back into the stables. But far more clearly, I could still see the pope standing before me in the Hall of Saints, doubt twitching across his face. And now I saw a deeper fear.

  As Camilla scoured the copper, the wet sand screeched slightly. My whisper was so faint that she could not hear me. “That is what frightens you, isn’t it, Your Holiness? That we will arrive at these corners of the winds, only to find Maria in Ravenna.”

  On our fourth day in Imola, once again we observed Messer Niccolò’s ritual and the arrival of his informant. An hour after the latter departed, we had a knock on our door, the first of our entire stay in this city. I looked at Camilla and said with false cheer, “You see, His Holiness has not forgotten me.”

  Camilla had already gone to the door. “Shall I open up?”

  I nodded, my nerves raw.

  From our bedroom, I could see our caller on the threshold. This youth was nearly as smooth-faced and ruddy as the mule-keeper�
�s boy, but attired at considerably greater expense, in the vermilion and yellow hose and matching jacket of Duke Valentino’s household. At once he presented Camilla a little card, dipped gracefully to his knee, and left us.

  Camilla frowned as if the missive had been wrongly addressed. “Madonna, this is not from His Holiness. His Excellency Duke Valentino has summoned you to the Rocca this evening. To ‘Cena nel Paradiso.’ ”

  Supper in Paradise. I did not know what Valentino meant by those words; they seemed little more than another riddle, much like his father’s. I could not even guess if Valentino had summoned me on the pope’s behalf or for his own reasons. But perhaps he knew that a thousand memories would rise around me regardless, like a field of lavender springing up from bare soil, the perfume almost suffocating. For a moment I felt that I could not breathe.

  When I could speak, I said to Camilla, “We’ll have to wash my hair.”

  III

  The brief afternoon was nearing its end when I put on the gown I had kept in my traveling chest, folded beneath a layer of dried rose petals. This was a camora of exquisite loveliness and great value, the cloth a cremisi velluto of the deepest red I have ever seen, brocaded with gold-and-silver threads standing in relief against the sheared velvet. At my throat I wore a very rare Roman cameo—carved in sardonyx, the portrait was a young woman or perhaps the goddess Luna—on a string of Venetian pearls; my hair was braided in back in the coazzone fashion, my hairnet woven of gold threads.

  Camilla had brought along a mirror I obtained in better times, which I now despise, because the quicksilvered glass reveals even the smallest flaw. I swear by the seven churches I had not looked into this glass of truth since the week Juan was murdered, back when my hair was blond. “God’s Cross,” I said, “who is she?” After five years of dyeing I still did not think of myself as sable-haired. And of course I no longer looked anything like a girl, though perhaps neither did I the last time I appraised myself in that mirror. But the shape of my face had not changed: still the pale forehead, too broad, and long nose, which I have always regarded as too humped; the delicate mouth, too small and puckered; and the chin too narrow. “You know what my mentor, Gambiera, told me the first time she dressed me up to do business?” I said to Camilla. “ ‘You look like one of those bird masks ladies wear at Carnival.’ ”

  “I think she also said you were a very gorgeous bird,” Camilla told me, still fussing with my hairnet. “A ravishing golden songbird. Or so you told me one night when you had too much Vernaccia.”

  I stood up and put my hands to Camilla’s long, grave, ethereal face as if caressing an angel. “You know you are my most precious sister and most beloved amica, forever and always.” And then I let her go, because Fortune knows when you cling too long to someone.

  The Rocca, I remind you, is at the southwest end of Imola, a squat but massive square of gray stone with a stout round tower at each corner, surrounded by a moat full of water that was, by the time I crossed it that evening, already as dark as the oncoming night. As you approach, the walls seem to rise into the sky and when I looked up, the ravens circling over the ramparts appeared little larger than locusts.

  Once inside the walls I announced myself to the guard at the gate, whereupon a soldier in a silver breastplate was attached as my escort. He led me through a procession of vaulted rooms, with pikes, halberds, and cannonballs stacked everywhere. The scent of all the greased metal was so much like dried blood that I almost gagged.

  Having passed through these foreboding warehouses, I was grateful to enter a quiet little courtyard occupied principally by fruit trees, this bounded on the far end by a graceful portico of modest size. My escort led me to a door within this arcade, knocked, looked in, and gestured me on.

  Though the room I entered would have been too small for a grand public event, it was more than sufficient for a private supper; the lofty ceiling allowed the smoke from all the candles to rise into the vaults, permitting an unclouded view of the lavish tapestries on the walls and a long trestle table covered with cloth of gold so gorgeous that it seemed a mortal sin to serve wine on it.

  Several of the gentlemen seated around that table, most of them garbed in high-collared black tunics, were familiar to me. Agapito da Amelia, the duke’s personal secretary, talked behind his hand to Michele de Coreglia, whom everyone called Michelotto. The latter had the vague features of a shopkeeper; a moment after you turn away you can scarcely recall him, which was perhaps why Valentino was said to trust him with his most “delicate” errands. Ramiro da Lorca was an intimate of the pope as well as of Valentino; though hardly a young man, his dusky, proud satrap’s face did not betray his age. Of the several men present who were not among Valentino’s circle, one of those I recognized was the Duke of Ferrara’s ambassador, Pandolfo Collenuccio, a noted scholar, weary-eyed and hoary-headed; I could presume that a few of the most important envoys had been summoned to this supper, though to what end I could not guess.

  The room was warm enough for a dozen ladies to dress as if it were St. John’s Day, each one a radiant blossom next to her grave, monochrome gentleman: lips deeply red, bosoms and bare shoulders blushing like dawn, here and there a rouged nipple peeking out amid ruffles, lace, and glistening damask. I was at a loss to find one who was not what we call a “Venetian blonde,” with hair that outshone spun gold, a match for smiles more perfect and brilliant than the pearl necklaces that adorned their elegant necks. There is a name for such women, which had just entered the vernacular when I left the business: cortigiane oneste, or “honest courtesans,” although less charitable lexicographers will say “honest whores.”

  At the head of this splendid table, seated alone, was Duke Valentino, master of the Romagna, idol of all Italy, the instrument of ambitions his father—our Holy Father—had only imagined when he made poor Juan their fragile vessel. The duke gave a curt little nod, whereupon a page showed me to my chair.

  Contrary to his brother Juan, Valentino displayed a preference for sober attire, the tight collar of his black velvet jacket exposing only a thin band of white shirt. The candles glazed his milky complexion; his auburn hair fell straight to his shoulders, framing the lean, saintly face that God had set upon a wrestler’s neck. His mustache and sparse beard were closely groomed, so that the latter more resembled rust upon his jaw—which was as solid as iron plate. However, many of Valentino’s most striking features were feminine, the soft pendant of his lower lip and a nose so finely sculpted that a woman would envy it. His hawk-wing eyebrows rested closely over piercing eyes, the pupils and dark green coronas surrounded by uncommonly clear whites.

  At the far end of the table an alta band played and a sweet-voiced young woman sang the sorrowful “O mia cieca e dura sorte.” Yet hardly had I perched upon my cushion, when Valentino lifted his finger and halted the music.

  All eyes came to their duke—who had nearly closed his own, his eyelids slightly fluttering. “I am certain you are all familiar with the revelation of Saint John of Patmos, as he watched the new city of Jerusalem descend from Heaven. A city built of jasper and gold.” Valentino’s voice was thin, almost frail.

  It seemed he would not go on, when all at once his eyes shot open, his next words so sharp that everyone sat straight up. “His Holiness and I do not intend to wait for great cities to fall from the heavens. I have been speaking with my architect and engineer general—you all know Maestro Leonardo, from Vinci. Our esteemed maestro has authored his own revelations, visions of cities where plagues cannot be spread, where smoke and fetor cannot foul the atmosphere, where the streets are not clogged with whores, charlatans, and ruffians but instead are spacious and open to the most useful forms of commerce. Cities where mills and geared machines will perform the labor of men and beasts. Cities where all men can enjoy justice and libertas, regardless of rank or wealth.”

  Valentino swept his eyes about the table, as if challenging any of us to deny this vision. “Tonight I propose the first step toward such a city, because
like Jacob, we must begin to climb the ladder to Heaven, rather than wait for the last trumpet.” He lifted his cup. “We have completed the articles of agreement that will restore peace to the Romagna. Only when this treaty is signed can we begin to build our New Jerusalem here on Earth.”

  All the blood might have drained from my head. Everything I had heard, whether from the lips of His Holiness or from the streets of Imola, had led me to believe that the Romagna would soon become Armageddon, as Valentino was forced to defend his conquests against the very condottieri who had helped him achieve them. But this “treaty” could only mean that these soldiers for hire, having declared war against their patron, were to be welcomed back with kisses and embraces. And if peace between Valentino and the condottieri was now imminent, every assumption I had made regarding the pope’s errand would have to be discarded. It would hardly remain in His Holiness’s interest to discover an association between the murdered woman, Juan’s amulet, and his former and now future allies.

  I heard the rest of Valentino’s address as if I had a pillow over my head: “For that beginning I am grateful to our most honored guests.” Valentino tilted his cup slightly toward the opposite end of the table. “My esteemed brothers-in-arms, Signor Paolo Orsini and Signor Oliverotto da Fermo, who comes to us on behalf of the most excellent Vitellozzo Vitelli.”

  The two men seated at the far end of the table nodded and raised their cups; upon entering the dining room I had given this pair only the most careless examination. Now my mind nearly screamed at me: Juan’s murderers are here. At this table. And those same bloody hands had just been invited to sign a treaty with the father who still mourned their victim and the brother who alone possessed the skill and courage to avenge him.

  Paolo Orsini displayed the excesses of his station, his face bloated and sagging; only the arrogant thrust of his jaw and the great hump of his nose gave any suggestion that his lifelong profession had been that of arms. But his companion, this Signor Oliverotto da Fermo, quite resembled a lord of the battlefield. He was perhaps Valentino’s age, his features resembling a bust of a Greek athlete; even beneath his velvet jacket, one could distinguish the shoulders of a discus hurler, though they were draped with languorous curls the color and sheen of polished bronze. His pale, wide-set eyes drifted around the table, pausing slightly at each face.