Signora Da Vinci Page 4

  Of his younger brother, Francesco, he had few kind words.

  “He is a feckless boy, no ambition whatsoever. He’s content to stroll from farm to field to orchard.”

  “He takes more after your father then, as you take after your grandfather,” I observed.

  “No,” Piero insisted, flushing with irritation. “My father may not have chosen the law as a profession, but he is a clever businessman. Francesco wanders around talking to his goats!”

  Despite the harsh words, Piero introduced me to Francesco one afternoon, bringing him to our assignation, a gesture that delighted me. It was clear Piero wished to “show me off ” to his feckless brother, thinking we would like each other.

  We did.

  I saw much of myself in the gentle young man, his extreme love of the natural world, and his ease moving through it. Whereas Piero pined for the rich, exciting life in the city, Francesco stopped to gaze at every flowering bush and stuck his nose into the fragrant blossoms. Animals of all kinds loved him—the horse he rode, the birds he fed from his hands. Even sheep followed him around.

  “The sheep especially,” Piero had once blithely commented one day as Francesco rode off after a picnic we had shared at the river.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “I mean that he sodomizes sheep, among others. My dear brother is a Florenzer.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Caterina, Francesco does not love women. He loves men.”

  I was growing very confused. I knew nothing of such things.

  “Why do you call a man who loves other men a Florenzer?” I asked.

  “Because Florence is teeming with them. They’re so common there that the Germans have taken to calling their deviants after our city. Now all of Europe is doing the same.” Piero softened, brushing a strand of hair off my forehead. “Francesco likes you, though. If he weren’t a Florenzer he would probably be in love with you”—he pulled me to him—“like I am.”

  I smiled inwardly. Piero had never said those words before. I could not ignore them, but I did not wish to speak of such things so forth-rightly. “What about your sister?” I asked. “She’s married to a much older man, is she not?”

  He nodded, tracing the line of my chin with his finger. “They’ve moved to Pistoia. He has designed a new gun. One so small it can be held in one hand. I think one day he’ll grow very rich . . .” Piero smiled. “Like me.”

  “Is she in love with him?” I asked almost shyly.

  “My sister with her husband?”

  I nodded.

  “No.”

  “Do you think people who love each other should marry?” I said.

  “No,” he answered matter-of-factly, “unless those people are you and me.” He turned to me and kissed me very sweetly.

  The words and the kiss were like a pitch-covered log thrown on a fire. I pulled him to me and soon we lay perspiring, disheveled and panting as if we had both run a distance.

  Piero sat up suddenly. “I will talk to your father tomorrow morning.”

  The breath went out of me. Any normal girl would have insisted on such assurances from the first moment a man began courting her. For that matter, any normal girl would not have made her own choice of a husband, nor spent every afternoon lying alone in a field with him, kissing and touching and longing to give away her virginity.

  Piero had always been the one to rein in our passions, stifle our urges. He was a man of the law, he had stated with pride. He wished for a proper wife and legitimate children, most especially sons who would carry on not only his bloodline but his honorable profession. His father and Francesco, despite their many declarations of enjoying the livings they had chosen, he believed, had made a terrible error. His own son would never make that same mistake.

  Now Piero was determined to ask for my hand.

  I had been, in a part of me, dreading this moment. Of course I wished for marriage with Piero, was longing for my new life as a respectable wife. But I knew, in some part of me, that my father would disapprove of the match.

  He did not think well of Piero’s family. The incident of his parents’ late payment and less thanks for the apothecary bill was but a fraction of it. Piero’s father had a reputation in the village for cheating his workers, cutting wages in a bad season rather than taking the loss himself, and showing no concern whatsoever if his employees were injured or became ill. He was even stingy with the widows of tenants whose families had worked his land for generations.

  It was all this that had kept me from mentioning even once to my father that I had fallen in love and was planning to leave his home for the home of this wealthy—but in his mind, undistinguished—family. This, as well as the thought that Piero was an unsuitable husband for a girl with a mind so filled with education, philosophy, and heresy as I was.

  I loved Piero so that I had, of late, found myself cursing Papa for having made me into the freakish woman I was. All I wanted was a normal life with my husband. Where we lived—Vinci or Pistoia or Florence or the ends of the earth—didn’t matter. Nor did how many children, girls or boys, as long as we had them.

  Sometimes I cursed myself. I was the most ungrateful daughter who had ever lived. Dear Papa, who had been both loving father and mother to me, was suddenly the enemy, he who had opened my eyes to worlds most men and virtually all women had no privilege to know. I was content to open my legs, and like any ordinary woman, let that be enough to take me through the rest of an ordinary life.

  But of course Piero was right. He must speak to my father. We stood and he helped me arrange my clothes and hair, and blotted my cheeks with cool water from his flask, so I didn’t appear to be a girl who had wrestled all afternoon with a man ten years her elder.

  His eyes had gone suddenly liquid. Smiling with a quiet happiness he took my face into his cupped hands. “My little wife,” he said. “Mother of my children.”

  That was all I needed to hear. What was left of my restraint fell away and my womanly humors took hold. I kissed him in a way I had not, in all those afternoons, kissed him before. In a way that, having heard his intentions, left no doubt as to my own.

  We made love that day, on a rug under the broad branches of a fruited walnut. Gentle as Piero was—constantly kissing my face and whispering in hoarse gasps how beautiful I was, how long and graceful were my legs, how like honeyed hills were my breasts—I found the act more painful than pleasurable. I secretly prayed there was more to lovemaking than this and afterward, when I saw the spot of virgin’s blood on the rug, I began to weep.

  My lover comforted me very sweetly, and we made plans for his visit to my father’s house the next morning. He would go home now and tell his family of our plans.

  I could hardly breathe on the walk home, quivering with mixed delight and fear. What would my father say? Would he be angry that I had kept so important a secret from him? Would he, despite his low regard for Piero’s family, accept him as my husband? And most terrifying, would Father be able to tell from looking at me that I had lost my virginity?

  When I reached our house I noticed on the cobbled street in front of the apothecary a clutch of gossiping villagers to whom I managed a “Bon giorno.” They all returned it with friendly smiles, and I realized how easy it was for me to smile back. I was going to be the wife of Piero, the up-and-coming notary!

  Inside I found my father just wrapping a package for a woman who, by her reedy thin body, could only be Signora Malatesta. In the package was surely the poultice for her husband, who was suffering from arthritis. Her back was to me as I entered but I heard her say, “I cannot see the door, Ernesto, but by the look on your face there is only one person who could be walking through it.”

  It was true. My father’s delight in his only child was known by all of his clients, patients, patrons, and customers, and that constituted nearly every villager in Vinci. I could see his handsome face now, the reserved closemouthed smile and the crinkling at the corners
of his eyes.

  “Bon giorno, Signora Malatesta,” I said and, after giving my father a quick peck, added, “I’m going upstairs.” That was our code for “I’m going to tend the alchemical furnace.”

  As I passed through the storeroom I heard him call after me, “Did you bring the hyssop?” I pretended I was out of hearing and clomped extra noisily up the stairs. In fact I had entirely forgotten to pick any. In the last weeks, every day I’d gone in the hills to meet Piero, I had been careful whether before or after seeing him to do whatever I had told my father was my purpose—to pick an herb, gather moss or a fungus.

  This day all of it had gone out of my head. Today I would either confess that I had forgotten to pick the hyssop or explain to him the real reason I had been staying away so often from the shop and our own apothecary garden.

  I was racked by a chaos of emotion, wishing desperately on one hand for Papa’s workday to be finished so I could tell him my glorious news, scheming on the other to keep the announcement secret till Piero arrived in the morning. I was tending toward the latter, for I was worried. I believed there was less chance of my father saying no to a grown man, a respectable Florentine notary, than to his fourteen-year-old love-struck daughter.

  Piero was charming. He would make it clear that he was better than his family and that, in any event, nothing would satisfy him except Ernesto’s blessings on the marriage. The religious and philosophical differences between Piero and me, I decided, could be overlooked if there were love and children and a full family life.

  The more I considered it, the surer I was that surprise was to be my greatest help with Papa. I did not know how I would conceal my excitement till the next morning, and go about my chores, and sit across from him at the table as we ate our evening meal. Or for that matter, how I would get a wink of sleep that night.

  In the end it had been torture, sweet as it was, torture all the same. For so many years my father and I had shared the same secrets, held ourselves apart from the world. Though I tried to push such thoughts from my mind I knew that I had betrayed his trust, stolen away from our “camp” to Piero’s, and nothing I had known would ever be the same again.

  The moment the sun rose I was up. I bathed carefully, even washing my hair and brushing it till it fell in dark silken curls around my shoulders. I could hear Magdalena at her housework on the second floor, and my father’s footsteps on the stairs going down to the apothecary.

  In my daze I remembered only belatedly about the alchemical fire and raced upstairs to the laboratory to pile hardwood into the furnace, hurriedly stoking it with the bellows.

  Down again, a kiss on Magdalena’s forehead, ignoring her admonition to eat something, and quickly down to the shop.

  Piero had promised to arrive just after opening, and I wanted to be there for every moment of the revelation, the argument—if there was to be one—and the inevitable grant of Papa’s blessings.

  There were two customers waiting when father opened the door. Signora Malatesta, looking ashamed, needed a new poultice, as she had allowed the dog to run away with the one she’d been given for her husband yesterday. A young man came in and showed my father some ugly boils on his back.

  I became impatient almost immediately, trying not to grimace when Father instructed me to get on the ladder in the storeroom and fetch down the most aged nettle.

  I thought I would scream as I mashed the unpleasant leaves for Signora Malatesta’s poultice, and I actually did let out a yelp when, in my nervousness, I knocked a bottle of horsetail tincture all over my chest.

  I raced back up to my room, terrified I would miss Piero’s entrance, but by the time I had changed into a fresh bodice and reentered the shop, my love had still not arrived.

  More customers came and more time passed. I was annoyed that Piero had not come at the time he said he would. As morning became afternoon I became angry, and when Magdalena called us up for our midday meal I barked at my father that I had no appetite. He looked baffled at my outburst and said that if I was not eating I could watch the shop while he did.

  My whole body was trembling with anticipation. Where was Piero? Something must have happened to him! Perhaps he was hurt, ill. That must be the case, for he was never ever late for our meetings. I should go to him. He needed me. Might need the services of my father.

  I was half out the door when I realized I could not just leave without my father’s permission. And what reason would I give? I had not today—as on all the other days of the secret trysts—given him fair warning of my journeying out to the hills, necessitated by a lack of mullein, or our only jarful of woad salve turning rancid and needing replacement.

  It would seem odd for me to suddenly rush out. And what if I did, and missed Piero’s visit altogether? There were several ways through the streets of Vinci from his house to ours. He might be stopping along the way to bring us a small gift. What if he was even now in a field picking some pretty flowers? Oh, why could he have not come when he said he would?

  My father had returned from his dinner, his usual good-natured self, though eyeing me suspiciously, for I was not prone to such outbursts as I’d made that morning.

  I silently decided that my only course was to wait for Piero’s arrival, whatever time that was, at least until closing.

  The rest of the afternoon moved with the speed of a lethargic snail, my nerves fraying with every passing minute. When Father had closed the door on the last customer I could bear it no longer.

  “I’m going out!” I fairly shouted.

  “Out?” he said mildly. “Out where? To do what?”

  I had not prepared an answer and instead stood spluttering helplessly in the doorway. “I’m just going, Papa!”

  “Caterina . . .”

  I slammed out and began a fast walk toward the old castle and the mill house that stood in its shadows.

  It was a fine house that Piero’s family had built five generations before. Three stories high, a large portion of it was devoted to a grain mill inside, driven by a cleverly designed waterwheel on the outside. On one side stretching far down the hill was a long, narrow olive orchard whose trees now, in high summer, were bursting with plump green fruit. The back wall of the main enclosure was, indeed, the ancient Vinci Castle bulwark, but the whole of its large gardens and its several outbuildings were enclosed by shorter but still-sturdy masonry walls.

  The front gate was imposing, two high wooden doors, crossed and studded with iron fittings, proclaiming that the family inside was important and prosperous.

  The gate was firmly shut.

  I wished to pound on it and cry out Piero’s name, but even in my desperate state I knew that to be a fatal mistake. A future wife of this house must be dignified, not some mad shrieking creature.

  I stood there pretending serenity, praying that a family member or servant would exit or enter. I would calmly ask them of Piero’s whereabouts. But with no one coming or going I found myself pacing, blowing up little clouds of dust around my feet.

  The sun was beginning to set. I could not stand here in the dark. I must act!

  I picked my way around the perimeter of the wall till I reached the olive orchard. I chose my target. There was a huge ancient tree so close to the compound wall that it overhung the garden.

  I hiked up my skirts and climbed it.

  Protected from sight by the gray-green leaves of the olive tree, I peered down into the yard. Little was happening. Just a few chickens scratching in the dirt, a stable boy carrying tack into the barn. No one I recognized as family was anywhere to be seen.

  I pounded the tree trunk with frustration, crying out at the pain.

  “Caterina?” I heard a man say from below.

  My heart leapt. I looked down, only to sink with the gravest disappointment at seeing not the da Vinci heir, but Francesco.

  “What are you doing up there?” he asked. “Come down. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  I allowed myself to be helped from the tree, trying to regain
something of my dignity. Finally we were face-to-face. The brothers resembled each other, I thought, though Piero was taller, and Francesco’s features were softer, sweeter.

  “Do you know where Piero is?” I finally managed to utter with something resembling calm.

  “I do, Caterina. He is in Florence.”

  “Florence!” My calm shattered instantly. “How can he be in Florence? He was meant to come to my father’s house this morning to ask him for my hand.”

  “I know,” Francesco said.

  He knew! It was no secret then. All the family must have known of our plans.

  “Why did he go without coming to tell me?” I demanded. “When is he coming back?”

  Francesco looked stricken. “He will not be coming back for some time.” Francesco paused to collect his words. “My father . . . our father . . . is very angry at him. They quarreled.”

  “They quarreled over me,” I said, feeling the skin on my arms rise in gooseflesh.

  He nodded.

  “Last night, Piero announced his intention to marry you.”

  I smiled, heartened at that, even though I knew it would be the only good news I would hear from Francesco.

  “Father told Piero he was dreaming if he thought he would be allowed to marry . . .” He grimaced as he said, “. . . the likes of you.”

  “The likes of me,” I repeated.

  “They are not my words, Caterina, and if you do not wish me to go on . . .”

  “No! I want you to tell me everything.” I clutched at his arm. “Everything.”

  This he did, with as much gentleness as he possessed in his gentle soul. But nothing could soften the knife edge as it sliced through me with every callous, offensive sentiment. What could Piero have been thinking? My family was nothing, my father a minor tradesman who took his payment in duck eggs. Piero was meant for much better than a poor village girl. When he married—to a girl his father and grandfather would choose for him—it would be into a family of wealth and high position. The girl’s substantial dowry would serve to enrich her husband’s family’s coffers.